by Kim Newman
Just for something to do, he poured a tumbler of whiskey, and sipped. The liquid made his broken tooth shriek, allowing actual sunlight to stream into the dark. The reality flash was short-lived. It took more pain each time to dispel the visions. Maybe Jago’s dream would finally usurp everyone else’s and become reality. He drank to the pleasant thought.
He strolled to the window and looked at the chaotic battle. Giant locusts crawled over the dead, six-winged 1950s special-effects horrors with scorpion tails grafted on to their hind parts. His tumbler was empty. He refilled it. No danger of getting drunk. There was enough fear adrenalin and nerve-deadening pain in him to counter a quart of Jameson’s.
He couldn’t work out how long Lytton and Susan had been gone. Time twisted and contorted around Jago. The black sunny day outside could have been any time in the morning, afternoon or evening back in the real world. Perhaps months had passed since moonset, perhaps only a few seconds.
He started playing with octagonal beer mats, making honeycomb patterns. Bored, he went behind the bar and scavenged. He hoped he’d find something to use in his defence, if it became necessary. All he came up with was a plastic box half-full of shiny drawing pins. Maybe he could scatter them in the path of something barefoot. He pocketed the box, hearing it chink as it slid against his hip.
Teddy was either asleep with his eyes open or in a comatose daze. Pam, tired of being stretched beyond breaking point, was coming round. He offered her a drink, and she shook her head.
‘Are you down for the festival?’ he asked, for want of anything else.
The girl nodded sulkily. ‘I’ve lost my boyfriend.’
‘Snap. Well, nearly. My girlfriend’s off somewhere in this mess.’
‘We were going to break up after this week.’
‘We probably wouldn’t have made it through to autumn,’ he admitted.
‘I think I’ve lost my sister, too.’
Pam was dabbing her face with a hankie, licking the cloth and then using it to work the clotted make-up away from her eyes and mouth. An ordinarily pretty face emerged.
‘Why aren’t we mad, like the others?’
‘Good question,’ he said.
The pub door opened, and Paul saw fear light Pam’s eyes. Teddy moaned, his first sign of life in minutes. The saloon door pushed in and an Angel stepped through, wings bent to squeeze under the lintel. Paul recognized Janet, the champagne girl with the quick tongue. She recognized him too.
‘Are you saved?’ she asked.
Inside the saloon, she spread her wings. They grew from her arms, her fingers turned into lengthy, feathered bones. Her robe hung torn, and her skin shone with an all-over halo.
‘Pretty Polly,’ she said in a strangled parrot voice.
Pam was smitten, mouth a perfect circle.
Janet turned to the girl. ‘Are you saved?’ She extended a wing and brushed Pam’s cheek with feathers. ‘It’s not too late, repent your sins.’
The girl was torn. She had a choice between the glowing fantasy and Hell on Earth. She threw herself against Janet, and allowed the Angel to fold wings around her. The girl’s head rested against Janet’s feathered shoulder, wings tight around them like a fur muff.
‘Paul?’ Janet said.
He shook his head.
‘One saved,’ Janet said, looking at Paul and Teddy, ‘two lost…’ She backed out of the saloon, shouldering through the door. ‘Not a bad score.’
Paul followed, and was in the pub hall when Janet and Pam got to the outside. Pam clung to the Angel’s neck. Janet, straining, extended her wings and jumped into the air. He watched them rise, dodging red bat shapes and falling stars, on course for the shining castle of the Agapemone. Pam was heavy, and dangled like an oversize necklace, but Janet’s wings were stronger than they looked. The Angel wasn’t graceful, but she was air-worthy.
A scorpion-locust scuttled towards the doorway, and Paul slammed the wood into the hole. The sting smashed through the door about a foot above the lino, and wedged, squirting poison. Paul avoided the steaming splash, and hoped the thing was stuck. The sting tugged against the hole, breaking off splinters and dribbling, then was withdrawn. A locust leg stuck in through the hole and scrabbled upwards for the doorhandle. Paul crushed the leg to the door with his shoe, and it went limp, torn off at the locust equivalent of a shoulder. He could hear the thing yelling, with a rich Somerset accent, shouting, ‘I’ll ’ave ’ee’, over and over.
Teddy, groggy and shell-shocked, was in the hall too. Paul didn’t agree with Janet. He’d been given two souls to look after, and lost one. That struck him as a terrible score.
10
Problem one was getting through the panicked crowds choking the approach road. Waving the gun had no effect on people who’d seen giant bugs and flying women. Lytton fired once, into the air, and the report—which normally caused deafness a mile off—was lost in the clamour. With Susan holding his hand, he shoved, pushed and trampled with the rest, inching towards the Manor House. It was impossible to miss the way even in the unnatural dark: the Agapemone was lit from the inside like a neon novelty.
‘I suppose Jago is in there,’ he shouted.
Definitely, Susan said, inside his mind.
Lytton shivered. She’d never done that before.
I didn’t need to.
Witch.
I read that.
Sorry.
With Susan inside his mind, he was able—forced?—to concentrate. He became single-minded in his purpose to keep her away from whatever else was cluttering his forebrain. Like how often he thought of her recently. Her eyes, especially. Her occasional tight smiles.
I’m flattered, she thought, immediately swallowing it, trying unsuccessfully to keep it from him.
For the first time, just when he had no time to be compassionate, he realized how guarded Susan had to be. She was not really the chilled cynic she seemed; like him, she needed a wall to hide behind.
People began to give them a wider berth, as if an invisible cowcatcher were advancing before them. Lytton saw the road under his feet as the crowd parted, like the Red Sea for Charlton Heston.
‘Is that you?’
Yes. Like it?
‘Keep it up.’
When the casualties were listed, Jago ought to be lost among the rest of the Js. Lytton had always known being a snake meant, eventually, biting. Now, he didn’t have time to think it through. Besides, he hadn’t been given a sanction for his wet job. This was strictly a solo decision, taken because of his special knowledge. He hoped he’d never be called to justify his bite to Garnett or the minister.
If it were me, Susan thought to him, I’d want you to do it. Really. He’s not human any more. All the things that count are gone.
That wasn’t what bothered him most. He was afraid Sir Kenneth would want to keep Jago alive precisely because he could do what he was doing in Alder. What army would not want to have the Wrath of God on its side? This catastrophe might, within the parameters of the IPSIT project, be counted a success.
They were at the gates of the Agapemone, where multitudes gathered, staring up at the shining house or jostling forwards, seeking admission. The door, unaffected by the light that had seized the rest of the building, hung in space, a heap of faintly moving people on the front steps.
Look.
Lytton followed Susan’s direction, and for a moment couldn’t see what she meant. Rising out of the crowd was the tree that shaded his own front door, children hanging out of it like agile monkeys.
There’s nothing there.
Precisely.
The Gate House was gone, collapsed or torn down. In its place was a Gordian knot of naked bodies. The cluster-fuck had grown, swollen with sinners who’d lost the hope of Heaven and saw no reason for restraint, and Calvinists who believed predestination had won them a ticket to Paradise and their own actions could not queer their passage.
‘Fucking Hell,’ he said.
That’s right. That’s exa
ctly what it is. The Fucking Hell.
A head and torso rode the orgy. It was Sharon Coram, greased with bodily secretions, singing out in a continuous coming. Someone turned a hose on the cluster, but water just added to the lubrication. Some components of the churning pyramid only moved because people moved against them. Those at the bottom must have suffocated or been pressed to death. In the end, everyone would wind up at the bottom.
They tried to force their way through the gates, staying as far away as possible from the cluster. It had destroyed his house and was sucking in new people all the time. Lytton thought of things lost for ever, and realized there was nothing irreplaceable. He had not spent his life picking up essentials. He’d miss a few music and video tapes, and some of his broken-in clothes. Otherwise, he’d have junked it all when the job was over anyway.
A middle-aged man attacked the cluster with the hose, sloshing and whipping. He called a halt like an exasperated football referee during a twenty-two man punch-up on the field. He was inveighing loudly against sin and sodomy, lust and lechery…
Who is that? he thought.
You don’t see him around much, Susan said in his mind. It’s the vicar.
Arms and legs reached out of the heaving cluster, and the vicar was pulled in, stuck to the surface of the heap of bodies. His clothes tore as he was worked, protesting, to the apex. Sharon was waiting for him, a ravenous queen spider, and her tongue was halfway down his throat in an instant. His lower body was sucked in towards Sharon’s momentarily unoccupied loins, and the cluster gave an obscene cheer as he began to respond. In a minute, he was just another part of the permanent floating orgy. The abandoned hosepipe spewed water.
Lytton and Susan were through the gateway. Inside the grounds, the press wasn’t quite so bad. Able to breathe almost easily, they walked across the lawn to the Agapemone.
‘Well,’ he said, setting foot on the human steps, ‘here goes…’
* * *
Barbarians were at the gates. Alarums sounded.
‘And I stood upon the sand,’ Jenny said, ‘and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy…’
She looked to Allison, who was ready. The girl saluted Beloved. They knew who was coming, and how he must be met.
* * *
This close, Susan was almost doubled with pain, a mass screaming inside her mind. She forced herself onwards. Excelsior! Jago’s unconfined energy rioted, eating away her Talent, spreading frenzy like an infection through the crowds. It had got worse as they climbed the hill, and it had been bad enough down in the village.
You’ll have to kill him quickly, she thought, cleanly.
James understood. All those briefings must have got through to him.
The knot of sexuality from the Fucking Hell made her uneasy. A lot of Jago’s unconscious problems were sexual, and they found fruitful soil in people around him. Everyone was screwed up in the bedroom. Even straight Christianity was founded on the repression of sexual drives; Jago’s brand systemized his belief-corseted desires into an entire panoply of rituals and practices.
Inside the Agapemone, choirs of angels chorused. Divine Light throbbed in the walls, and the Chosen raised alleiluyas to His name.
Sex and God. That was the recipe for an Anthony William Jago. Take a kid and fuck with his mind, teach him sex is an activity for sewers and God a bearded bastard who smites multitudes. Throw in the kind of zealous drive that leads to high office, extreme wealth and a following of thousands. Then give that kid the power to destroy a continent. Forget the Talent. It was a wonder that, after the Jago education, no one had conventionally ended the world. Beloved wasn’t unique in his upbringing, just in his capabilities.
The hall wasn’t empty. Others had ventured in, and stood about, bewildered. A foil-and-cardboard-skirted Roman legionary was a refugee from some fancy-dress theatre group, thin-chested inside his Stallone-shaped breastplate. Irena Dubrovna, the resident echo, was in her doorway, blindly watching. She was almost solid, another side effect of Jago’s mental meltdown. Susan thought the others could see her too. There were people trapped inside the walls like flies in amber. By the front door, arms and legs stuck out like mounted trophies.
‘Where?’ James asked.
She nodded towards the stairs. The focus was in the centre of the house. James thumb-cocked his automatic, and began up the main staircase.
Someone appeared on the landing and charged, fists flailing, bellowing rage. A gust of hatred came with the man, thumping Susan between the eyes. The vileness of the unleashed mind made her want to vomit. It crawled and squirmed around him, pouring on to Susan like stinking waste.
Faster than her eye could catch it, James brought up his gun and shot the man in the head. The hate was turned off like a radio, but he kept charging. His body thudded against James, knocking him backwards. They both fell to the floor, carpet wrinkling under them. Susan, relieved at the sudden removal of the man’s jarring burst of emotion, helped James get out of the mess and to his feet. The corpse wore the last of a police constable’s uniform, his face and hands tattooed with skulls and swastikas, symbols covering every inch of his skin. The last of his hate leaked away, melting into the floor.
‘Erskine,’ James spat.
He was shaking. He had never killed before, and was having to deal with it. Susan wasn’t sure the snake was strong enough for this job. His speciality was surveillance, not assassination. She held him, hand to his forehead, and tried to soothe his worries away, to clean his doubts. It’ll be all right, she thought, really trying to mean it, it’ll be all right.
Roughly, he shoved her away. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I won’t be brainwashed.’
His disgust hurt her, but she was humbled, ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No, you’re not.’
* * *
He heard the call of the soil. The land was imperilled. He pulled up roots, and stumped out of the garden of the Pottery. Sue-Clare and the children were still a part of him, just as he was a part of them. Their togetherness gave him pleasure. The tree-worshippers, already organized into a hierarchy, followed at a respectful distance.
‘We are your servants, oh Swamp Thing,’ said Dolar, who wore a garland of Maskell’s leaves around his forehead.
They’d been eating his fruit, and were on the way to becoming part of the family. Dolar had been hurt, and the fruit was making him better. Tiny shoots emerged from his speckled shoulder wound, pea-green boils stood out on his knuckles.
He knew where he should take root. The centre of Alder had shifted, from the Valiant Soldier to the Agapemone. The village should have known that when the old tree died. He was the new tree, and would last for centuries, growing from the heart of the community.
* * *
He wasn’t sorry Barry Erskine was dead. He wasn’t even sorry he’d been the one to kill him. But Lytton was still shaking. If not in body, in mind. And he knew Susan could tell if he was shaking inside. When she slipped into his mind and tried to shape him, he understood how Jago worked on his disciples. And he felt like a tool, like the conscienceless piece of machinery in his hand. Susan was trying to aim him at Jago, groping in his head for a trigger.
Two landings up, the Agapemone no longer even resembled the Manor House. It had become someone’s idea of Heaven, walls of white silk billowing gently, marble fountains of warm milk at every corner, air honeyed with incense. Classical busts of Jago perched on pedestals at regular intervals, faces wise, suffering and benevolent.
Susan was close behind, urging. She was homing in on Jago like a plane following a radio signal. Even he felt the force of Jago’s Talent. It was all around, like the sourceless light.
Eleven bullets. No, ten. The monster, Erskine, and the pointless warning shot. A spare clip in his pocket.
In Heaven, it was cool and calming. He still heard noise from outside, but very low in the background. Susan tugged his arm a
nd pointed up another flight of stairs. Warily, they climbed again.
* * *
Teddy saw claws scrabbling at the frame of the window, then crunching around the wooden bars, smashing the glass. Paul picked up a stool and stabbed at the window like a lion-tamer, shooing away whatever was outside. Teddy covered his face with his arm, and heard the window and a considerable chunk of the wall being torn away. He still hurt, but thought he could probably run if he had to. He’d felt safer with James around. Paul was much more panicky, and had already lost Pam to the winged woman. He choked on dust, and looked again.
‘Come on,’ Paul said, ‘we can’t stay here.’
The beams of the low ceiling were creaking threateningly, the whole of one wall gone. Beyond the rubble, Teddy saw large insects fighting over a scrap that had once been alive. Whenever his cracked ribs ground, the insects wavered and vanished.
He got up and, with Paul, ran. With Susan gone, the shell of the Valiant Soldier had turned from refuge to trap. They hurdled the wreckage, and emerged blinking into a dark world lit by a glow from the Agapemone and the bright red of infernal fires. The battle was on the ground on all sides, also in the air. Demon things tore each other. An eight-foot-tall hooded skeleton with an old-fashioned scythe was cutting out the feet from under running people.
‘That must be Death,’ Paul observed.
A bull-headed beast with the body of a lion and the tail of a lizard charged and bore down upon Death, crushing him to the ground, snapping his scythe, scattering his bones with a worrying shake of his head.
‘Great,’ Paul said, ‘Death is a pussy.’
‘Look,’ said Teddy, pointing up.
Between giant bats and rocketing pterodactyls, a set of ordinary lights winked. Teddy heard blades whirring and felt wind on his face. The helicopter hovered as a large searchlight tried to mark out a level spot for a safe landing. Through open side doors, Teddy saw two huddled rows of soldiers, clutching guns, gasmasks on. Paul waved his arms up at the helicopter. A soldier drew a bead and, for a horrible moment, Teddy was sure the dickheaded squaddie was going to put a bullet in Paul’s head.
