by Kim Newman
She spoke as she walked, and distance expanded. Light grew, becoming clearer as it spread. Angels filled the skies to the infinite distance. Among them, Hazel saw Patch, Mum, Paul, schoolfriends, Wendy, boys she’d forgotten. Everyone she’d ever met, so much as shared a bus with. A sea of faces flowed around and above, wings knitting into one mass, haloes linked like a chain, robes flowing together. In her mind, she found more words, ‘and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand’.
At the foot of the throne, she looked up at Beloved. He seemed miles above her, but she could reach out and touch Him, for she was His Sister-Love. Jenny was by her side, smiling and golden. His wounds opened and shining blood flowed from His feet and hands, streams pooling before His throne, rising to Hazel’s knees. She was washed in the blood of the Lamb. She raised the book above her head, its seven seals blinking like seven eyes. Beloved took it, and she was relieved of a huge burden. Hazel and Jenny knelt in the blood of the Lamb and dipped their hands to the pool, feeling the thrill. For a moment, Hazel was Jenny and Jenny was Hazel. Their understandings doubled, they embraced in the pool—now up around their waists—and looked to Beloved, adoring, praising, beseeching.
Jenny took a deep breath, shaking off the fog of rapture, and recited, ‘Blessing and honour and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.’
‘Amen,’ Hazel breathed, proud of her handmaid.
Beloved touched fingers to the first seal, snapped it in two with a pinch.
‘Amen,’ came a deafening chorus of Angels.
6
‘Stop playing with your food,’ Allison told Terry.
The boy was a complete wolf now, trussed by the last of his clothes, snout deep in the Toad’s open stomach. In the tree-filtered daylight, the blood on the grass and the ground was old and faded, barely even wet. It had been scattered in a fifteen-foot circle.
She had found them a hundred yards into the wood, in a hollow bounded by trees. Mike Toad was half buried, loose earth and dry leaves over his face and chest. Terry was chewing the dead boy, softening gristly scraps for swallowing.
Ben inside, Jazz gone, Mike sacrificed, and Terry a wolf. Of the army, that left her alone.
‘…and I looked,’ Ben said in her mind, ‘and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’
Terry looked up, around and at her. His wolf eyes were still afraid of her. But that wouldn’t last long. Soon, all memory of his earlier life would be wiped, replaced by mindless instinct. He growled through his food, warning her away from his kill.
She left Terry to it, and found one of her runs, a straight pathway, impossible for anyone else but easy for her, leading up over the crest of Alder Hill and back down towards the village, emerging in the gardens of the Agapemone. That, she knew, was where she must go next.
‘…power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.’
She crouched low and wiggled into her run. The tunnel-like borehole through the undergrowth was well concealed. Beyond the brambles she had cultivated as offputting walls, the close-in branches and bushes were comforting, as if she were safe in her childhood bed, blankets tented around her, toys nestled against her legs. There was a natural earth-and-animal smell. Amid the change, it was comforting to find the familiar.
On elbows and knees, she sped as if swimming through the run. She moved as fast as an animal, low-hanging twigs catching her hair. Under her, the soil radiated a warm aura.
The battle begun, she was called to arms. With Ben gone, she knew to whom she owed loyalty. Her parents always said Jago was mad or a con man. Terry and Teddy used to claim he was a religious fool and an old hippie. Jenny Steyning thought he was Jesus Christ returned. Before she got kicked out of school, she’d heard Tina Starkey’s ex-boyfriend allege the Agapemone was a nest of satanic child abusers, and Jago was the high priest of a devil cult. If she’d thought about him at all before this, Allison had considered Jago a threat, almost a rival. They had all been wrong. Now, Allison knew him for what he was. He was her God, if no one else’s. Badmouth Ben had been but the palest advance scout. The man in the Agapemone had spoken to her in dreams and through the curves of the land. He’d shown her how to read auras. She wished her granddad had lived to meet Jago.
Outside her brush and bramble tunnel, people were shouting, screaming. She smelled smoke. Fires had been kindled. She licked air, tasting blood. She wondered about Jenny. Allison had known the girl all her life, but never really thought about her. As a kid, Jenny had been careful to keep out of Allison’s way. Since she’d joined the Agapemone, they’d barely glimpsed each other. Now, Allison wondered if the light-haired girl was her sister-in-soul, the other half of her dark comma, the white half that completed the yin-yang. Jenny had come to understand Jago, had seen long before Allison that the man was the flame to which she must bow, but they were both Jago’s favoured servants.
There were things only Jenny could do for Jago. And there were things that were down to Allison. Last night, she’d killed for Jago. She’d chewed human flesh in her personal communion. She loved Wendy for leading her. Not until she tasted the woman’s meat had she truly known her destiny.
There’d be people who’d stand against Jago. He was too pure, too perfect for this world. He’d need someone to protect him. Not someone like Jenny, full of milk-and-water kindness, but someone not stifled by Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild. Someone like her.
She was near the Agapemone now. The knit over growth above her was thinning out, and light poured into the run. In the dark of her mind, she saw Wendy, flesh ripped away, kneeling before Jago and beseeching him, ‘How long, oh Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’
Allison came to the end of the run and stood up, bending aside two flexible bushes, stepping on to a neat lawn. Half-people shamble-danced around a corpse which lay amid the croquet hoops, one shoe off, football-sized lumps bursting out of its neck. A man kneeling cross-legged with an electric guitar, turned into an egg-shaped fuzz of fungus, wrung strange chords from his instrument, fused-together fingers banging against strings, painful yowls booming from his portable amplifier.
People congregated around the Agapemone. Their collective aura made Allison shield her eyes for a moment, the kaleidoscope of coloured glows forming patterns no one else could see or understand. ‘Not yet,’ Ben’s voice whispered in the crowd noise, ‘but soon!’ The Manor House was a castle of light, a white-hot jewel set in the green of its gardens. It had become its own aura. People streamed towards it, pushing into its walls, becoming part of the building. She saw human shapes inside the walls, dissolving and dispersing. The Light undulated like a submarine cliff thick with glowing seaweed.
A naked youth with a long face painted on his chest and belly—circled nipple eyes, grinning mouth under the navel, malformed wart genitals erupting through a pubic goatee—ran up to her. He shouted, ‘Gypsy princess, gypsy angel’, and tried to kiss her. Didn’t this fool know who she was? She put a thumb in one of his real eyes and heaved him, shrieking, away.
The ground was shaking, spreading cracks swallowing slabs of turf and mounds of gravel. Dancers stumbled and dropped into holes, cries fading as they vanished into the earth. The guitar player was suddenly sitting on a pillar surrounded by chasms. He kept flinging his mitten-shaped hands at the strings, a mouth aperture opening in his face fur to emit a strangled vocal. ‘Wild thing,’ he sang, over and over, the chords more agonized, ‘Wild thing, wild thing, wild thing.’ Evil-smelling clouds of coloured smoke rose from the cracks.
Allison walked across the lawns with perfect balance, unafraid of earthquakes. She was protected as she neared the Light. A huge shadow fell upon the land, making the Light shine that much brighter. She glanced up. ‘The sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as b
lood.’ The sun and the moon were both clearly visible, a swarming black ball and a bright red eye-dot. Many panicked and began wailing, fighting, pushing themselves towards the Agapemone. She stood calm, understanding the sky show for what it was. Special effects.
‘…and the stars of Heaven fell unto the Earth.’
A volley of bright bullets came out of the sky. A wedge of the crowd were struck and fell, bloody or dead. Allison knew she was safe. Steve Scovelle, who worked for Jenny’s father, was standing nearby, compulsively wiping his oily hands on his overalls. A shining dart, twinkling as if it were trailing tinsel, speared into his face. Another took him in the leg. He fell, trampled under. The falling stars were bigger now, the size of rocks and boulders. People were smashed down as if by giant fists.
‘…and the kings of the Earth, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the rocks of the mountains, and said, “Hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, from the wrath of the Lamb…”’
All around Allison, people were dead or abasing themselves, pleading. As she heard Ben voice the prophecy, she imagined presidents and generals letting themselves into their deep-level shelters, preparing for a holocaust that would reach even them. Missile silos must be open all over the world, swords of Armageddon free of their scabbards. If Jago wanted everything wiped clean, she was sure he’d use the most modern methods as well as the most ancient.
She went round to the front of the Agapemone, persuading the crowd to part, and stood before the stairs. People lay flat, as close together as herringbone tiles, on the front path, and each of the steps was a living person, stretched full across. A moving human road led to the door. The face of the house was a cliff of light, featureless white. But above the human steps stood the familiar wooden door, lock exploded, side panels smashed. The door hung, held not by hinges but by tendrils of glow. The world might shiver, but the door stayed a fixed point.
‘…for the Great Day of His Wrath has come…’
Allison walked slowly over the screaming path, up the groaning stairs, and stood before the door.
‘…and who shall be able to stand?’
‘Me,’ Allison said. ‘I shall stand.’
She pushed the door inwards, and entered the Light.
7
When the sky darkened, Teddy reckoned that was the end of it. He sat against the wall and waited for the Hand of Death to grab his goolies.
‘Recognize this?’ Susan asked the man from the Pottery.
He shrugged.
‘“Black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood,”’ she said. ‘Book of Revelation, somewhere.’
Blood rained from boiling darkness. The ground gave way all round. Something like a red iceberg loomed from one of the cracks, ripping apart the fence at the end of the pub garden.
‘I can only remember the famous bits,’ James said. ‘“His name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”’
‘That’s the one,’ the woman said.
Hell was all round.
Teddy didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell, normally. His parents didn’t go to church except at Christmas and Easter. In his stream at school, he had not had to do religious education. He had never owned or opened a Bible. Christmas was turkey and presents, Easter was chocolate eggs. The Pope was a Polish bloke in a white dress, God was the old man with a beard on Spitting Image, and Jesus was a hippie in films they showed on television on bank-holiday afternoons.
But he recognized Hell.
Angels flew overhead in the red darkness, and devils stalked below, tridents and swords bloody, hooves gouging earth, bat wings flapping, horns sharp. Teddy wanted to face the wall and forget it, but couldn’t.
A fat red devil with Douggie Calver’s broad face came out of the Valiant Soldier. Curly goat’s horns swept around his face, and his eyes were cat-slit. He wore a ‘Drink Scrumpy’ T-shirt and strained-to-splitting Bermuda shorts. The devil stank of cider and used matches. Talons sliced towards Teddy, but James stepped under the blow and smashed the devil in the face with his gun, making blood spout from its ram-nose. James punched him in the belly, and he was seen off. As he ran, an arrow-ended snake of a tail dangled between his legs.
Scarlet lightning cracked the daytime dark of the sky. The blood rain redoubled, turning the ground to fiery mud.
* * *
Paul spat out the blood that flooded his mouth. The shower ended, he was covered from head to foot in sticky red. At last, it had rained. From the black above, waves of heat came down. The blood dried to a crust and fell away in patches. He saw Susan’s face mottled with missing jigsaw pieces of clean skin amid the red. She was scraping clotted filth out of her hair. In the dark she had a slight glow, an all-over halo.
Revelation was the only book of the Bible he had ever read all the way through. It was a cornerstone of his thesis that the imagery of nineteenth-century apocalyptic fiction was adapted from the biblical original. Now, knowing the prophecies didn’t seem to help. He couldn’t get anything straight, and the Bible had too many tribes and angels and seals and beasts to cope with. Tribes, he remembered in a mumble, of Judah, Aser, Manasses, Nepthalim, Levi, Issachar, Zabulon, Benjamin. He wondered if Jago were picking up sides for the battle of Armageddon, allotting people to their tribe. He wanted to be left on the bench with the bespectacled fat kid.
‘Susan,’ Lytton said, ‘how… extensive -?’
She answered before he could finish, picking the question from his mind. ‘I don’t know. It must be localized.’
‘The parish, the county?’
She thought hard. ‘I can’t tell.’
Above, the black churned. The sun was a hole, sucking everything in until it was an absence in the sky. The moon, still not set, was a ball of blood, red as a stop lamp.
How far away were people looking up and seeing this? Were there people a few miles off who saw plain blue and summer sun? Or did everyone in the world have the sky according to Jago?
‘He’s just one mind,’ Susan said, ‘one vision. His Talent feeds on all these people, but he can’t change the whole solar system…’
‘Can’t he?’ Lytton said.
Creatures were fighting in the dark, killing and breaking each other. Ignorant armies clashing by night.
‘Think about it. If the sun went dark, we’d freeze, not boil. The sun and the moon aren’t up together. Jago is projecting pictures. He’s not really making this happen.’
Something with scythes for arms set about a crowd of devils, slicing and dicing until only jellied demon fragments, still writhing, remained.
‘Like I’ve always said,’ Susan insisted, ‘it’s not demons and devils, it’s just chemicals in the brain.’
A gale of demon laughter swept past the pub. A person, piranha imps tearing at flesh, stumbled by, crying out. The victim went down in a pool of flashing teeth, and was devoured.
Paul picked a pebble and bit it with his bad tooth. Sunlight and pain poured in. A man, torn almost inside out, lay in the road. There were no monsters, but there might as well have been. All around, people hurt themselves, hurt each other. As pain receded, dark flooded back.
* * *
Inside the tree, the Maskell family were together. Jeremy, closer than ever to his parents and sister, could see through their eyes, feel through their fingers. Even Jethro was a part of it. Their roots were deep in the earth, anchoring the tree to the soil, so the quakes did not affect them. He was safe. Daddy couldn’t hurt him without hurting himself. Daddy didn’t want to hurt him any more.
It was night again, but a good night, warm and comforting. Protected, Jeremy watched with interest. People who hadn’t changed suffered. Over the top of the Pottery, from the topmost branches, Jeremy saw the garage forecourt. People were pulled into the ground as if the asphalt had become a sucking lake of tar. X and Ingraham were up to their waists, going deeper as they tried to get out. One of the petrol pu
mps was bobbing, pulled from below. With a gulp, it disappeared completely and sticky black slowly filled in the hole. The tar smoked, belching through cracks in its surface.
Lisa Steyning floated as deep as her armpits, a tyre around her, black goop in her pretty-pretty hair. Not panicking like X and Ingraham, she wasn’t going under. Jeremy wasn’t sorry to see Lisa trapped, but was glad she wasn’t sinking. She was mean to him most of the time, but there was something about her—her hair, perhaps—he liked, or thought he would like in a few years, when he got interested in girls. Would have liked, he corrected himself. He would have to be his own teacher, and watch how he thought. Things were different. His life wasn’t going to be what he’d expected, what his mother and teachers had told him it would be. Only Daddy had really known, and he had not told anyone because they’d never believe until it started happening.
It was funny, having a tree as a body, sharing a body with the others. Hannah’s thoughts whispered in his mind, reciting her times tables. That was Mummy’s remedy for nightmares. Whenever Jeremy or Hannah had bad dreams, Mummy suggested they go over their times tables—as far as they had learned them — in their heads, and the evil dwarves or scary monsters would go away. Times tables, she explained, were logic. Numbers could overcome the things in the dark. Mummy had been wrong. Jeremy felt Mummy’s love, neat and safe like a blanket. And he felt Daddy’s strength.
On the lawn, Fancy stood, chewing apples that fell from the tree. The horse had been sick, but was better now.
X and Ingraham had been gulped under. Ingraham was gone altogether, but X floated face down, the back of his X-shaven head above the surface, arms outstretched in front of him, the back of his T-shirt a bubble over the black, the rest of him deep under. Little flames danced around him.
Jeremy felt the buds of the tree swell. There’d be more fruit soon.
* * *
‘She’s right,’ Paul said. ‘It’s like there are two pictures.’
