The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Later I returned to my chamber and slept.

  In the morning I discovered a singular fact: part of one of the pellets from the day before had been packed between two of my lower back teeth and was still firmly in place. Neither pushing at it with my tongue nor scraping with a fingernail could dislodge it. When I had dressed I took a match, broke off the head to make a tiny jagged spear, and tried to pick out the compacted meat with that. Again, no success, but I did finally manage to shift it far enough to release some of the juices that by some marvel it still contained. They trickled across my taste buds.

  Twelve minutes flashed by in a subjective moment! I checked the lapse of time, then returned the watch to my waistcoat pocket, still only half-believing that the act of consuming necrotic flesh should have such a potent effect on my mind. No matter how frequently the time distortion occurred it invariably astonished me.

  I realized I was entering a familiar state of mind, in which starkest gloom jostled with boundless optimism. I therefore decided to measure the effect of the pellets I had eaten the previous day. Since it had obtruded itself into my life, the German bomber had come to signify a kind of yardstick of temporal motion. Its advances and reverses were a guide to the progress of the main conflict. Now that I had realized this connection it made no sense to subject myself needlessly to the torments of the pit. I could gain the reassurance I sought with much less risk to my sanity.

  It was raining when I left the house and the crisp frosts of the previous few days were no more. The sloping sward of the Long Lawn was already sodden in its lower reaches. I was glad to reach the cinder path that led into the trees.

  The Slough, when I came to it, lay undisturbed, the surface calm and untrammelled, apart from the constant patterns of overlapping circles made by the rain on the few stretches of clear water. Above the muddy water, a precious few inches above it, lay the plummeting body of the doomed warplane. At once my spirits lifted! The latent power of the pellets now in my possession was beyond doubt.

  In the latest manifestation, the aircraft was more or less physically intact, not counting the visible damage the machine-gun rounds had caused to the cockpit cover and engine cowling. Both wings were attached, and although the spilling fuel, the blazing fire and the black smoke streamed back from the engine, it was possible to see it as still a fighting plane, not a broken wreck.

  The tip of the wing closer to me – the one that I knew within a second or two of real time would break off catastrophically as the plane ploughed into the mud – was only two or three inches from the solid ground on which I stood.

  A single session in the hagioscope, and this! One meal of the new pellets! Fifty or sixty more such pieces still to come!

  Was it at last the final stage of the bitter struggle against the chaos of the pit?

  Then, immediately banishing the heady optimism, a voice said in my mind, “Get me out of here!”

  It was the same voice as that familiar, loathsome cry from the heart of the pit. My first thought: It cannot be! Had the monster found a way to track me beyond the hagioscope, away from the house, to here?

  It came again, more urgently, “I am about to perish! I implore you! The canopy is jammed! Can’t you do something?”

  I realized that it was the helmeted figure who stood in the cockpit. His face was pressed desperately against the perspex panes of the cockpit cover and both of his arms were reaching up, struggling to release the catches that held it in place. His movements were frenzied, panicky.

  “I can’t help you!” I shouted at him.

  “Yes you can! Find something with which to release me. I beg you! Save me from this!”

  “What are you?” I cried. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I am an emissary from the future.”

  I am strong with mysticism, not with physical or muscular development. The predicament of the man on the aircraft wrenched at me, but it was not in my power to assist him. He wanted me to wrestle with the jammed cockpit cover? Or to try to cut my way through the metal side of the fuselage? I regarded him across the short distance that separated us. He was locked in a time and destiny of his own, an alien intruder, subject to the will of a universe fundamentally different from mine.

  His voice came at me repeatedly, a sane but desperate plea for help. Wondering what if anything I could do, I stood there regarding him, playing at the soreness of my gum with the tip of my tongue, fretting at the piece of pellet that had become lodged in my teeth the day before. It seemed to have worked a little more loose since waking this morning, and when I sucked at it I distinctly felt it shift. Still watching the man in the aircraft I picked at the fragment of meat with the nail of my ring finger, and in a moment it was out. The familiar essence lifted like gas against my taste sensors.

  The plane moved back.

  “You are who I am seeking!” the voice cried in my mind. “You are Owsley!”

  “I am.”

  I recoiled with shock from the discovery that he knew my name!

  “And you are haruspical!” he called.

  “I am.”

  Now he stood erect, abandoning his panicky efforts to release the cockpit cover. His demeanour was strangely calm. “You must release me if you can. You doubtless know why.”

  “I believe I do,” I said, responding to the composure that had come over him and which was also now surrounding me. ‘But there are questions…”

  “None matters!”

  “How did you…?”

  “Owsley, be silent!” His mood had abruptly changed again. “Release me from this aircraft! Then perhaps we might have reasons to converse.”

  Disliking the authoritative tone, yet even so respecting it, I turned away from him and followed the long path back in the direction of the Abbey. I looked around me as I walked, hoping to spot something hard and heavy and made of metal. Nothing offered itself as suitable. When I entered the house I noticed at once from the clock in the stairwell that more time had fled while the pellet juices flowed in my mouth. It was already past noon and as I went along the ground floor corridors I glimpsed Mrs Scragg pacing impatiently in the short passage outside the kitchen. Fortunately, she happened to have her back towards me at that moment, so I was able to pass unseen beyond her.

  In the utility room, after a search, I found a long steel spanner or wrench, I knew not which, apparently left behind by a workman at some time in the past. I assumed it would be sufficient for the task of breaking through the thick perspex, but my skills, as I say, are not those of the physical body. As I carried the heavy implement back down the lawns towards Beckon Wood I felt self-conscious with it and knew that it hung at an unnatural angle in my grasp. The weather was still cold and unpleasant: it was raining persistently and the damp twigs on the drooping branches of the trees brushed against my face and hair. As I followed the bend in the path and again saw Beckon Slough, I raised the spanner in my hand. Holding it before me I strode across the muddy ground to the site of the wreck.

  The man remained standing within the cockpit, calm and poised, awaiting my return. I went to where the tip of the wing hovered a few inches above the muddy ground.

  “While you were gone,” the man said, in my mind, “I was trying to establish how best to force the canopy.”

  “Don’t you know already?” I said, facing him.

  “Why should I?”

  “You are a member of the Air Force, are you not? The German Luftwaffe?”

  My mind seemed to laugh mockingly. “I, an aviator? I have never before been inside such a thing. I am a man of learning and of the spirit, as you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Tomas Bauer. You, I know, are James Owsley.” Amazement stirred again in me, but at once the man added, “Of course, you are the one I have travelled to find.”

  Since the death of my father I had known that I was upholding a tradition, one that I had to honour, and one which eventually I should have to pass on to another. I had expected, though,
that such release would not come for many years or decades. Tomas Bauer’s words, and the mystical circumstances of his arrival, informed me that the moment had come. Waves of relief, excitement and a distinct tremor of fear passed through me.

  However, the immediate problem remained of what to do to release Tomas Bauer from the aircraft. I was still holding the spanner aloft, but the feeling of foolish physical ineptitude was still paralysing me.

  I heard in my mind, “James Owsley, you must do as I direct. No more words!”

  I tried to assent, but it was as if a sponge flooded with chloroform had been pressed irresistibly over my mind, making it insensible. I felt myself propelled forward, raising my right foot like an automaton to step on the very tip of the wing itself. It took my weight, without dipping. I stepped forward and walked across the curved upper surface of the wing towards the bullet-riven cockpit. When I reached the curved housing of the engine I had to scramble over the hot metal case, carefully not placing any part of my body in the dangerous stream of escaping fuel.

  The propeller, still turning slowly a few inches away from me as I passed, set up a torrent of forced air behind it, neither to my perception moving nor turbulent but somehow compressed by the rotation of the airscrew.

  Then I was against the side of the cockpit cover itself, looking in at the man who had taken control of my mind. Tomas had removed his leather helmet and I could see his features clearly. He was a young man, tall and ruggedly built, with a shock of blond hair and a sturdily jutting jaw. He stared at me with an intent frown, exercising his mental will against mine.

  There was a part of the transparent canopy where two panels of it overlaid each other, apparently the place where the two halves joined after the front part had been slid forward and locked in position. Tomas directed me towards it. I slipped the edge of the spanner against what crack I could see, then heaved at it with all my might, trying to use it as a lever.

  When the thick perspex did not shift I felt my arms swing backwards, raising the spanner above my head. I brought it down with a tremendous blow, one far more heavy than anything I would have believed myself capable before now. The cockpit cover shattered at once, a large star-shaped hole appearing in the flattened top. Three more blows forced an irregular aperture large enough for a man to escape through.

  I reached down and held Tomas’s arms as he found footholds in the cramped cockpit and pushed himself up and through to freedom. As he clambered around I could not help looking down and past him, to where I could see the bodies of the two German aviators. The one in the left-hand seat had clearly suffered a direct hit from a bullet, because a large part of his helmet and skull had been broken away. He was slumped against his dashboard of instruments. I could see a bulge of blood rising through the gap in his head and knew it soon to be a fountaining gout to join the soak of blood that already covered his flying suit. From this evidence of a pumping heart I realized that the pilot must be, in a way, still alive. The other aviator, who outwardly appeared uninjured, although my view of him was restricted, also was leaning forward with his face against the instruments. His body was broken in some horrible way I shrank from trying to imagine. I had to assume he was dead or unconscious, even though there were no apparent wounds on him.

  While I was regarding this disagreeable sight with a sense of increasing horror, Tomas had climbed swiftly out of the cockpit and was standing on the wing beside me. He tugged at my arm, swinging me round.

  “We leave,” he said peremptorily. These were the first words he had so far uttered while I had a clear sight of his face. As I hastened to follow him, down the wing and through the turbulent stream of compressed air behind the propeller, I realized that the words I was hearing in my mind were not the same as those forming in his mouth. The words did not move with his lips.

  As I thought about this, he instantly replied, “I speak in German. You will hear, I believe, English. It is the same for me, in reverse. It is best, I think.”

  He jumped down from the wing. After a few uncertain steps on the muddy bank of the Slough he strode off along the cinder pathway. His long black coat swung in the air behind him. Now he was freed from the aircraft he was walking with easy, powerful grace, like an athlete. From his gait I would not have credited that he was haruspical: others of my calling that I had met were, like me, small in stature, bookish, introspective, timid in all matters that required strenuous activity.

  Tomas had implied that he was no better equipped to contend with problems of the physical world – otherwise, surely, he could have escaped from that plane without my help? – but even so nature had apparently blessed him with a strong and agile body.

  When we reached the part of the path where I normally struck up the Long Lawn towards the house, Tomas Bauer came to a halt. He turned towards me as I caught up with him. The dark shape of the Abbey, squatting on the brow of Beckon Hill, loomed up behind him. He extended a hand of friendship towards me.

  “I thank you James Owsley,” he said, and now that I was only a few inches away from him I found distracting the dissonance there was between the words I heard and the movements of his lips. “To you I owe my life.”

  “Why were you on the aircraft?” I said. “It makes no sense to me. Where was the aircraft going and who sent it? How was it shot down? How did you contrive it to crash on my property? What…?”

  He held up the palms of his hands to silence me.

  “Nor does it make sense to me,” he said. “I was in Germany, you are in England. The war was running its course and I could find no other way to reach England…”

  “To which war do you refer?”

  “The war between our two countries, of course.”

  “There is no war,’ I said. ‘True, there are portents, but the German Chancellor would not be so insane…”

  “He is mad enough,” said Tomas. “You can be sure of that. In my time his madness has led to a war that is engulfing most of Europe. It is irrelevant to the greater struggle, the one in which you and I engage, but there is no avoiding it for practical matters. I was effectively trapped in my homeland, while my true work was here. The German army is poised to invade England…”

  “But this is fantasy!” I cried.

  “To you it might seem so. But I speak of what is a grim reality of the time in which I live. Four, maybe five years from this moment. Madness? Yes it is! Engines of war are turning, but they are not such deadly machineries as the ones you and I face. We confront a larger madness, a virulent incursion whose terrors would dwarf in significance a mere military conquest by one nation of another. You reside above the pit of hell and its denizens seek release. The portents have been written in texts since the dawn of time. I have studied many such texts and so, I know, have you. Our task is beyond history! War, pestilence, genocide, famine…these are trivial concerns, compared with what we confront! I had no alternative: I had to escape to England to be with you. After much doubt I came to the conclusion that the only way was to travel with one of the planes that was flying to bomb your English towns. I knew there would be risks, but in my desperation I saw no alternative.”

  “You raise more questions than you answer,” I said.

  “And I have told you they are of no account. I am here; that is sufficient. Are we at last to unite and engage together in our struggle against the creatures of the pit?”

  “In my life there is no other concern,” I said.

  “Nor in mine. So we must address ourselves to it.”

  He turned from me and strode purposefully up the lawn towards the Abbey. Once again I found myself following in his wake. His manner was decisive, arrogant, imperious. He behaved as if I had been merely caretaking the house until the moment of his arrival. As I trotted behind him, already furious with myself for allowing him to dominate me, flashing memories of the years I had endured alone were shining in my mind, almost dazzling me. Was Tomas Bauer somehow projecting them at me?

  No matter the source: I could not ignore them. I r
emembered the first time my father took me into the squint, so that I might experience the raw evil of the pit’s emanations and truly learn what it would mean to follow him there. He thrust my face against the opening so that I had to stare down into the merciless darkness, and while he held me with his knee against the small of my back he began an endless braying sermon. His leg moved up and down against me, his yelling voice becoming a terrifying stridulation. It was a new and stunning insight into my father.

  When I managed to free myself and struggle round to face him in the confined space of the hagioscope, he was looming over me, lit from all sides by the candles that guttered from every crevice in the rock walls. He bellowed his ranting, maniacal entreaties into the pit, swaying horribly from side to side, a Bible held aloft in one hand, a glistering golden crucifix in the other.

  I also could not forget the physical after-effect that the first experience had on me: the long hours that followed while I retched disconsolately into the pewter bowl beside my bed, a purging that was a making-ready of my body for the fray that on some dark level it must have known would be coming. Then there were those few precious weeks when my father allowed me to work alongside him, and when I, in my naïveté, had believed he was encouraging me and that we would work together for years to come.

  I did not realize straight away that his sudden interest in me was only a preliminary to a greater event: his resolution suddenly collapsed and he subsided into insanity. The disintegration of his will happened, so it seemed, overnight. Another glimpse of memory: a terrible confrontation with him in the Great Hall, when in the boiling rage of his madness he beset me with what he interpreted as my sacrilegious mystical leanings and physically threw at me the entrails on which I had been preparing the day’s labours in the pit, challenging me to consume them while he watched. Impossible, of course. He desperately wanted me to follow him, but my calling stood like a barrier between us, blocking his sight of me.