by Kim Newman
Tears started from her eyes. Daylight made things look worse than they’d done last night. There were deep wheel ruts where the fire engine had gouged its way over the lawn. Several shrubs were squashed flat or shredded to bits. She saw the black patch up on the hill where the fire had burned. The hose water had all gone, but there were earth clots, imprinted with bootmarks, where the mud had been. They now had the only well-watered garden in the village, not that it had done any good. The hoses had blasted into the hillside, making the orchard look like a strip mine. Mirrie’s flowerbeds were destroyed as if a giant boot had come down from the sky. The whitewashed side of the pottery building was scraped where the fire engine had pushed past it. She hoped none of the stock had been damaged. There was a bad smell in the air, oily and smoky with an undertrace of rot.
Looking around by the house, Hazel found the firemen had neglected to replace the iron drain cover. Peering into the black hole, she saw slimy stone and deformed mosses. She found the heavy cover a few feet away, and dragged it back, dropping it with a clang on the oblong hole, shifting it into place with her foot. Her wool-wrapped toes hurt. It hadn’t been much, but it was a gesture towards cleaning up. The rest would have to wait. She wondered what she was going to tell the Bleaches. They’d trusted her with the place for the summer, and here it was a battlefield. It was nobody’s fault, but she couldn’t have blamed them for being upset.
This whole thing—Paul, the Pottery, the country—was not turning out well. Hazel wondered whether she shouldn’t chuck it all. The trouble was Mike and Mirrie. They needed someone here until autumn, and had given her a good opportunity. She couldn’t pull out early and leave the place empty. If she went, she couldn’t expect Paul to stay.
In the house, the telephone rang, very loud. She looked up at the first-floor windows. The bedroom was curtained. Paul was still unconscious. At least, he must have been until the phone started.
She ran inside and picked up the receiver, instinctively gabbling out her parents’ number in Brighton, then apologizing and reading the Pottery’s off the dial. It was a journalist from a local paper, wanting details of the fire. ‘Was it the hippies?’ the reporter asked.
Hazel didn’t understand. ‘It was a fire.’
‘Might it have been the hippies, the festival people? Careless with matches? The drought?’
The man didn’t seem to be listening. ‘It was a fire,’ she told him, ‘just a fire. I don’t know how it got started. There were some kids camping up on the hill, but…’
‘Hippies?’
‘Kids. London kids.’
‘Here for the festival?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hippies.’
Hazel saw how the interview was running. ‘The firemen said it was just a fluke. Nobody’s fault.’
‘But the hippies… the kids… they had a fire going?’
‘I don’t know.’
The journalist asked her name and her age, then got back to hippies. ‘Were there any drugs, do you know?’ She didn’t have an answer.
If you weren’t local, you were either rich or a hippie. She and Paul obviously weren’t rich, so that automatically made them, if not hippies then hippie-sympathizers, hippie-collaborators. Back in Brighton, hippies were people her parents’ age, not kids.
‘Do you have an estimate on how much damage was done? For the insurance?’
Hazel couldn’t think. The fire, and more particularly the fire engine, had made a mess, but there was little damage that an insurance pay-out could put right. Besides, she didn’t know what coverage the Bleaches had.
‘It’s too early,’ she told him. ‘I’m just looking after the place.’
He hung up without thanking her.
Hazel got the impression the journalist had written his story before speaking to her. The call just helped him fill in the names. She’d bought the paper the man worked for once, hoping for information about nearby cinemas and music venues but finding only rugby-club members dressed as women for fund-raising revues, weddings, speeding offences, letters of complaint and stories about hippies damaging farmers’ property. Paul said this was like the Wild West, where there was a bounty on Apache scalps: if you took in some bloody hair hunks or the love beads from a dead hippie, theyd give you a flagon of cider and three groats.
She heard a clumping and turned around. Paul was making his way down the stairs like an old man, clutching the banister to steady himself. His hair was over his face and he hadn’t shaved. He wore shorts, slippers and his dressing gown. He’d lost the cord, and the gown hung open. There was a huge bruise on one side of his chest, purple and yellow.
‘Haze?’
He gingerly stepped off the stairs, arms out for balance. She wasn’t sure whether to hug him or back away for fear of hurting. The passage was too small for both of them to be comfortable so close.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, arms by her sides.
‘I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus.’
‘The doctor said you banged your head.’
‘There was a doctor?’
Paul held his head, pushing back his hair. He looked old.
‘He left some pills for you to take, and a number to call. He said to get in touch if you felt any lasting pain.’
‘I can’t feel anything else.’
‘Poor dear.’ That was the sort of thing Mum would have said. Hazel bit her tongue.
Paul managed to get to the front room by himself.
‘Can I get you anything? Tea? Orange juice?’
He shook his head, and eased himself into a chair.
‘The place is a mess outside,’ she said.
‘Haze,’ he said, trying to focus his eyes, trying to be serious. ‘Last night, I saw something. Up at the fire, there was something…’
‘That was the local paper on the phone. They want to blame it on kids. That’s typical, don’t you think? Blaming kids for everything.’
‘Hazel, it was…’
She looked at him, and he didn’t finish what he was saying.
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know. It was big, dangerous…’
‘The firemen put it out, though. It’s over.’
‘No… yes… maybe.’
Paul covered his face with his hands and rubbed. She had the impression he wasn’t that aware of her. He was trying to talk to himself, not to tell her anything.
Hazel remembered her dream. She could still feel the touch of the hands. She had never had a dream like that before, where she remembered a feeling rather than a picture.
‘I’ll go over to the Agapemone later and thank them. They came over to help in the fire. See, they’re not that bad after all.’
Paul looked at her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘be careful.’
‘Paul,’ she said, annoyed, ‘you can’t criticize. They were a help. Just because…’
Because what? She lost her train of thought.
‘Dangerous,’ he said.
‘Don’t be silly. I can look after myself.’
He almost laughed, almost nastily, ‘I’m not sure, Hazel. I’m not sure if any of us can look after ourselves.’
She didn’t know what he meant. He didn’t say anything more.
She knew she wouldn’t work today. The routine was broken. She’d go to the Agapemone. On the walk over, she could do some thinking. When she got back, she’d try to tidy up a bit. By then, Paul should be well enough to help. Although, at that, she was not sure of Paul. This morning, he was different. The doctor had said there was nothing broken, but Paul wasn’t being Paul just now, so maybe there was something wrong inside.
‘Tea?’ she asked again. Paul did not answer. ‘Please yourself.’
She stood up and looked around for her jeans. They were balled up on a chair, legs inside out. Pulling them on, she remembered the long legs she had been given in the dream. Long, strong legs, for running, for gripping. Paul leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. She wondered just
how hard the knock on his head had been. She pulled the blind on the front window and let it whizz up, toggle rattling against the windowpane.
The room was sunlit. On the floor, by the coffee table, she saw her plate, the girl plate, lying face down. It was in three pieces, a jigsaw roughly put together. She felt the loss in her stomach, and water leaked from her eyes. Her nose was clogged.
‘What is it?’ Paul asked.
She knelt by the broken plate and reached out to it. She could not touch it, could not turn the bits over to look at the face she’d drawn. She was sniffling, tears hot on her cheeks. It was not fair! Susan Ames, the woman from the Agapemone, had looked like the girl on the plate. She put a hand over her eyes and felt tears on the insides of her fingers.
‘Haze?’
She didn’t want to talk. Getting up, rubbing her eyes, she left the room, left the house. Outside, under the cruel sun, she knelt on the dead grass and bawled like a little girl. Her one decent piece of work. Gone. Lost. For ever. Some clumsy fireman, or Paul blundering about, or one of the villagers who’d crowded in. There’d been more than twenty people through the house last night, offering help, asking questions. Just a slip, and the plate was gone.
She wiped her face on the stomach of her T-shirt and tried to stop sobbing. Paul didn’t come out to her. She wanted the touch of the hands from her dream. They could put her plate together as new. They could take away the damage, mess and pain. She thought she knew where the hands had come from.
She stood up, dusty earth on her knees, and left the Pottery, wandering, asphalt hard and rough beneath her socks, down the road. She saw the tree outside the pub, dead and gloating. Up on the hillside, she saw the Agapemone. It looked like a calming place to be. She put her hands in her hip pockets and kept her head down.
3
Beloved stood over the camera obscura. The village was becoming crowded. The lower fields, set aside for parking, were filling with vans and cars. Brightly coloured tents sprouted like fungus in the camping areas. There were more moving figures than there’d been yesterday, people about the scale of toy soldiers. They’d been turning up since very early this morning. Some must have been driving all night.
Jenny saw the scorch where the fire had been, a scar on the yellow hillside, a hole in the picture. Beloved leaned into the illusion, and the hill bled on to His face, brown trees covering His cheeks. He smiled, and let His hands wander through the phantom village, rippling houses and people. Beloved was radiant this morning, glowing faintly. He had a definite aura, unnoticeable under natural light but plain in the dark at the top of the house. It made Him look like an angel.
Jenny saw the woman, a stick figure moving like an insect. Coming from the other end of the village, from the Pottery, she was walking quickly, awkwardly. Three newcomers on bikes silently buzzed her, making a skid turn by the old tree, heading off towards the camp site. The woman kept on walking. Beloved stretched out a hand and touched the tiny head. His finger sinking in so her pinpoint face was on His fingerprint.
‘Her,’ Beloved said, quietly, ‘she is Chosen.’
Jenny bowed her head. Unlike some of the other Sisters, she was beyond jealousy. No man or woman could have Beloved all the time. His grace was to be shared with all humankind. He nodded slightly, drawing the tiny woman to Him as if she were on the end of an invisible silk thread. Beloved held His hand, palm down, over her, casting a blot of a shadow. The plain black of the table showed through the vivid image of Alder, an earthquake chasm across the farms and houses.
Jenny raised her eyes, fascinated. It was hard to look away from Him. Beloved’s wounds were leaking again. A drop of blood formed in the centre of His palm, becoming heavier as it filled out, ballooning into a red tear. It splashed on to the table, shining in the illusion. The woman, as if alerted, stepped out of the way of the red rain and walked around the puddle.
4
His thoughts were too fast, dizzying away inside his head. He looked at the ceiling of the Bleach sitting room. It had been decorated in the late Sixties, when the Bleaches first came to Alder. Pictures from Sunday supplements had been pasted up in a collage. Faces from the past were frozen, fading slowly. Paul had been picking out people he recognized. George Best, Patrick MacNee, Anouk Aimée, Harold Wilson, Neil Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix. He had always found it relaxing. Now, it was a visual shriek.
The world was smashed like Hazel’s plate, and could not be put back together again. At least, not in a way he would be happy with. Reality, he knew, was a consensus, something everyone agreed to accept. Now, someone was trying to force the unacceptable on him.
In retrospect, it was the fish—not the Martian war machine—that had broken the camel’s back. That had not been just unlikely, that had been impossible. Paul kept thinking of the fish, the way it sank slowly into the pond, the fruitlike sucker that attached it to the bush. It must still be at the bottom, resting in thin mud, an impossible thing upon the possible earth. How could he have accepted it as natural, then walked away? Fish, he repeated over and over, do not grow on bushes.
This morning, sharp, clean pains were shot like darts from his broken tooth. Furthermore, his ribs hurt, his legs hurt, his face hurt. His mind, however, hurt most of all.
Things that could not be, were.
His head a lump of fudge-wrapped pain, he made his way from the sitting room to the kitchen, then out on the verandah. He couldn’t be bothered with tea or coffee. If the world made no sense, what was the point of breakfast?
Hazel had been right. The place was chewed up. She wasn’t around. She must have gone off to the Agapemone. Despite everything, it was his duty to warn her off, to prevent her getting mixed up with the cult. Once he’d dealt with the impossible, he would pay attention to that.
He looked at the hill, at the horizon where last night he’d seen the smoke. It was a distinct treeline, under a cloudless sky. If he’d been looking the other way, would any of this have happened? Or would he be worrying now about Hazel’s moods, not the shape of reality? Waking up, alone and hurting, in the double bed, his first thought—before it all crept back to him—was that Hazel was gone.
He still hadn’t got it sorted out in his mind, but he knew the Martian war machine had been for him. Who else would have recognized it? He sat on the verandah steps, leaning against the sun-warmed stone wall, and held his head. He wanted to take something to dull the hurt in his tooth, but he couldn’t afford to fog his mind. He needed to think this through. Anyway, although Hazel said the doctor had left pills for him, she had not told him where they were. He sloshed spittle around the tooth, imagining the pain washing away. Momentarily it helped, but pain came back in an instant.
Everything was changed.
Fish do not grow on bushes. And, worse, Martian war machines are not only impossible, they are fictional.
Almost anything else would have put less strain on his credulity, his sanity. If he’d close-encountered an alien spacecraft of unfamiliar design, all he’d have to do was accept a vast body of UFO lore, proceeding from the logical, well-founded position that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe to the farfetched, but not entirely lunatic, notion that such intelligent life was given to dropping by Planet Earth once in a while. If it had been a Tyrannosaurus Rex chomping on poached sheep, he could blame genetic engineers fooling with fossil tissue, guess that radioactive waste from Hinkley Point nuclear power station had seeped into the seabed and revived the creature, or assume a timewarp was operating in the locality. If it had been Lord Lucan, Elvis Presley or Martin Bormann playing with matches, the meeting would be merely unlikely and he could make a fortune tattling to a tabloid. If it had been a transparent Duke of Monmouth clanking chains and crying for his rightful throne, Paul would just have to admit there were such things as ghosts. These weren’t positions he was especially keen to adopt, but all were within the bounds of credibility. After all, the bulk of humanity subscribed to religions founded on only barely less unlikely premises.
But a Martian war machine? This wasn’t a scientific unknown, or a psychic phenomenon, or a strange-but-true story, or a miracle from God. This was something made up in 1898, something that had no existence outside the imagination of H. G. Wells. Somewhere in the world, you could find people who believed in ghosts and demons, elves and fairies, the curse of King Tut, Jesus Christ Our Lord and Redeemer, Whitley Streiber’s extraterrestrial anal molesters, American professional wrestling matches, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the yeti, George Bush’s campaign promises, the characters on EastEnders, the Hollow Earth Theory, Bacon’s authorship of Hamlet, Ambrose-Collectors from Atlantis, The Amityville Horror, Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ goal, ‘double biological’ soap powders. The human race, among its other accomplishments, could persuade itself, individually or in mass, to believe almost bloody anything. But nowhere had anyone ever—except briefly over Halloween 1938, when Orson Welles was trick-or-treating—believed in Martian war machines.
Yet the thing hadn’t been ambiguous. It had been what it was, as real as his pain. His bruises were proof. He could still feel the jarring impact of the machine’s metal leg. It had rattled his teeth, making his tooth flare. His skin was broken where the thing had scraped.
Paul experimented with the notion of hallucination. After all, he’d spent the greater portion of the last few months, the last five years, thinking about his thesis, and Wells’s Martians were central to his argument. People see what they expect to see: whether it be the Virgin Mary, dome-headed midgets in glowing saucers, or the buckskin-fringed King of Rock ’n’ Roll. He could have misinterpreted, seeing something that put him in mind of a Martian war machine and mentally transforming it into one.
He held his tooth between thumb and forefinger, trying to squeeze out the pain.
Seizing on the hallucination theory, he chewed it in his mind: the Martian war machine had been instantly recognizable because it was his Martian war machine. The War of the Worlds movie substituted Cornish-pasty-shaped flying ships, and the various illustrations he’d seen on book or album covers weren’t quite right. They were frailer, or more rounded, or less mechanical. The thing he’d seen up on the hill was his mental picture, compounded of the author’s description and his own detail-filling imagination. The thing appeared to him exactly as he imagined it. For a moment, he thought he had an answer, then he knew he had only more questions.
