The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “It’s all right,” said the airman glumly. “It’s not coming tonight.”

  “Another bleedin’ know-it-all,” the ARP man said sourly.

  The airman whispered as they went down into the basement of Draper’s Hall, “Don’t mind him. He just needs to get laid.”

  Not the only one, Cassie’s voice said.

  They spent an hour in the shelter together before the all-clear came. His name was Peter and he was a navigator. He was twenty, and seemed worldly and mature to Cassie. She was cold so he pulled his leather flying helmet out of his pocket and put it on her head. He walked her all the way home and they kissed again in the alley running between the houses. He put his hand on her forehead. “You’ve got a fever.”

  “I’m all right,” Cassie said. “Really I am.”

  But the moment had passed. Cassie sighed when she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She made to give him back his flying helmet. “You keep it,” he said.

  “Won’t you get in trouble for losing it?”

  “Yeh. Goodnight, Cassie. You’re too lovely, you are. Too lovely.”

  And he went back to his war.

  The next day Cassie lay in bed late, touching herself, thinking of her airman and other handsome men, sleeping fitfully. Now as well as the music her head was full of other sounds: high-frequency whistles and intermittent Morse signals and snatches of foreign language. When she rose the house was empty. Beatie had gone to work and Martha had left a note on the kitchen table to say that she had popped out to do some shopping.

  Cassie parked a stray curl behind her ear with a delicate finger and switched on the radio, fiddling with the tuning dial. The frequency whistle rose and fell, throbbed and hummed. There was Morse code. There was guttural language. She didn’t need an interpreter. It was going be the following night for sure. Last night the moon had been almost full. Tomorrow night it would be complete. Cassie shook with excitement. It was plain. Adolf Hitler would send his men, his bombers, his demons to Coventry tomorrow night. That was what he would do.

  “There you are,” Martha said, letting herself in, pulling off her hat. “Sleeping the sleep of the dead. It’ll do you no good, all this lying in.”

  “Tomorrow night. They’re going to bomb us tomorrow night.”

  “Eh? What’s that?”

  “More than before. More than last month. The big raid. It’s tomorrow night. I know.”

  “Know? How can you know?”

  “It’s a full moon tomorrow night. It’s coming. It’s going to rain fire here in Coventry, Mum.”

  Martha walked over and put her hand on Cassie’s forehead. “You’re shivering. You’re burning up. Do you want to go back to bed?”

  Cassie hadn’t even known what the airman had meant in his reference to the intelligence mansion at Bletchley, the government code and cypher school. Its very existence was supposed to be top secret. But the day before Cassie met her airman at a dance the Bletchley school had decoded a recent German transmission. The transmission laid down the signal procedures for an operation code-named not Moonlight Serenade but Moonlight Sonata, implying that a three-pronged attack would be launched against a British city on the night of the full moon. On the same day a captured German pilot was overheard telling his cell-mate that a three-phase raid would be made on either Coventry or Birmingham on or around 15 November.

  The Germans had invented a radio navigational system known as the X-Gerat, guiding a plane to its target and automatically triggering the bomb-release on arrival. The X-Gerat used four radio transmitters sending radio beams from different locations. It comprised one main beam aligned on the target and three intersecting beams. The German pathfinder pilots flew parallel to the main beam until they hit the first intersecting beam. That was their instruction to change course and fly directly along the main beam. Twenty miles from the target they passed through the second intersecting beam: a signal to press a button, starting a clock. Five miles from target they crossed the third beam: an instruction to press another button that stopped the first hand of the clock and started a second hand ticking. The bombing run had begun. When the two hands came together, the bomb load was automatically released on the people below. It was an efficient system for obliteration bombing.

  Bletchley had uncovered signals to special bombing units, all starting with the code-word Korn. They also decrypted information revealing that special Luftwaffe calibration signals would commence at one p.m. on 14 November.

  At 13:00 hours on the afternoon of 14 November the German calibration signal was detected. Two hours later British Fighter Command were satisfied that the X-Gerat beams were aligned on Coventry. The Air Ministry warned the RAF home commands that Coventry had become a special target.

  They might also have warned Coventry. The city’s anti-aircraft batteries and barrage-balloon units might have appreciated the tip-off; not to mention the Coventry Fire Brigade, the Chief of Police, and the local ARP. They might have tipped the wink to the mayor of the city, or rumoured it at the Coventry and Warwick-shire hospital.

  They chose not to. Cassie was the only person in Coventry who had been informed.

  * * *

  At one o’clock that afternoon, Martha and Cassie were about to sit down to lunch. Martha switched on the radio for the news. Just as it came on Cassie felt something click in her head, like a switch being thrown. “It’s started,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” Martha said, bringing the teapot to the table, thinking Cassie referred to the news broadcast.

  “I don’t mean the news. Do you think you should all go out to the farm? That would be best. You should go out to Wolvey where Tom and Una are. Safer, Mum.”

  “I can’t be bothered with that game,” Martha said. “If Adolf wants me he’ll have to come and get me.” When the early raids had started in June they had, like many other Coventry citizens, all gone out together to stay in the country. But what with the small aerodrome at Bramcote so close to the farm, they had found the concentration of bombs denser and somehow more immediate than when they stayed shivering under the stairs in the days before the Anderson shelter was erected.

  “Well I’m glad. I don’t want to go to the farm. I want to stay. Stay and be here. Stay and help. That’s it. I want to help.” Cassie spoke rapidly. Martha had seen it before in her. A repetitive but cheerful chatter. “But you and Beatie, Mum, I want you and Beatie to stay in the shelter. While I’m out. Helping.”

  “Is it your time of the month?” Martha said.

  Some time after six o’clock that evening Cassie changed from her dress into a pair of slacks, pulled on a pair of Beatie’s work boots, donned her coat and scarf and went out without telling her mother. She stopped by the park to light a cigarette and to look up at the night sky. A Harvest Moon, they had called it before the war. The moon was indeed loaded, and one great thing about the blackout, Cassie thought, was the restoration of the stars in the sky. The evening was crisp and cold and the cigarette smoke reared up like white horses’ heads briefly painted on the air. And if she swung her head the black night ran with tiny beads of colour, and she knew that these were radio signals that she could not just hear but could see tracking across the sky, and it was no point trying to fix your gaze on these tiny iridescent parabolas because they would be gone in a twinkling anyway and the only way to apprehend them with the human eye was to acknowledge the brevity of the leap they made into and out of the visible spectrum, and it was an extraordinary thing how few people understood that.

  Cassie was chipped out of her reverie by a burn on her hand. The cigarette wedged between first and second fingers had burned down to a stick of ash, unsmoked. The stub sparked as it fell to the flagstones, and she stamped it out under her shoe. She took her compact out of her bag and reapplied her lipstick by the light of the moon. She checked her hair in her pocket mirror, clipped it shut and returned her compact to her bag. “And the night,” she said; though she didn’t know why, because her mind was racing. Turning her collar agai
nst the chill of the evening, she proceeded to walk slowly towards Coventry city centre.

  At around seven p.m. she developed a strange feeling in her stomach, or perhaps in her bowels. A vibration. Then it spread across her body to her ears, until she understood that the vibration was not inside her but was the familiar air-raid warning sirens. She’d somehow anticipated it by several seconds. That sour, almost forlorn howl dragged up from the lowest place on earth, fattening and rising into a despairing moan, climbing at last until it wails, fighting to live at its uppermost note until it falls back, uselessly, defeated, and then climbs again, wanting to infect with its own panic. Cassie heard the whistles of nearby ARP men as they went through their drill. Soon, she knew, there would be more urgency. Within ten minutes she was right. The throbbing of incoming aircraft could be heard like a great rumour in the distance, behind the moan of the air-raid siren. The ARP men began to whistle more spiritedly and shout along the streets, some of them jocular – “Run, rabbits, run, my little rabbits!” The searchlights were thrown on, criss-crossing the night sky from points in the centre of town.

  Cassie pressed on. Then something beautiful illuminated the sky. It was a parachute flare, strontium-white and blazing brilliantly, hanging in the air. Then more, several parachute flares hanging in formation, dropped on the east side of the city and floating west in the light breeze. Ack-ack guns replied from ground placements in nearby villages, uselessly thumping shells into the sky; then Bofors guns from nearby, louder.

  In Swan Lane a voice from the dark said, “Come on, girlie, let’s have you off the streets.”

  “Hello, Derek,” Cassie said. “Where’ve you been these past weeks?”

  Derek was an old friend of Beatie’s. He’d been turned down for active service because his right leg was three inches longer than his left. “Cassie! What are you doing? Why don’t you get home? This one’s for real.”

  “I can see that. I’m out to help. Official, like.”

  Derek squinted at her. “Official?”

  “Go and do your rounds. Get some rest. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Derek snorted at this sixteen-year-old advising him. But she was already gone. Derek put his whistle to his lips but merely stared after her.

  Cassie took Thackall Street alongside the football stadium. There was a cut-through alley behind the football ground, and she hoped that route into town would help her dodge most of the ARP men. As she slipped through the alley towards Hillfields, Cassie could see families getting into their Andersons, and she thought she heard a snigger. Then another, and another, and she realized the sniggers were coming from the air. The sky was sniggering. They were incendiary bombs, producing an eerie sound as they twisted in the air. They thumped against the ground without exploding but spread fire where they fell, and they began to rain down in great numbers. Someone saw her from a garden by the light of one such flame and shouted, beckoning. But even when a different type of incendiary dropped with a flaring, phosphorescent flash, Cassie wasn’t going to be deflected.

  Why am I unafraid? she said to herself. This isn’t natural. It’s because, she told herself, it’s because I am meant to be here.

  Isolated minor fires broke out around her as she moved towards the heart of the town, and away from the sniggering rain of incendiaries. There was another sound in the air, like a beating of leathery wings as something fluttered around her head. It raised the goose-flesh on her arms, but she hadn’t time to think what had caused it because the incendiaries were followed by the crump-blasts of high-explosive bombs falling all over the city.

  A fire engine with its bell ringing sped past her on Primrose Hill. Most of the incendiaries around her were burning without effect in the middle of the road; others spread their fire. One licked at a gatepost in Cox Street and she tried to kick the flames away with her toe before a man rushed out of the house, smothering the small fire with a blanket. The man grabbed her arm and tried to drag her inside but she pulled free of him.

  The drone of planes overhead got louder, and it occurred to Cassie that there must be many, many bombers in the air above her head, otherwise the throbbing noise would have passed. She looked up and she could see them. Hundreds of them, in beautiful geometric formation. Some of them near enough to reflect the light of their own flares, others tiny specks caught in the beams of the searchlights. She could see tracers, and the brief orange puffball explosions of anti-aircraft fire, and still around her she heard both the sniggering and the unexplained, loathsome bat-wing flutter. In the sky she could also detect – briefly visible, now gone – the iridescence of radio waves, sparkling but following an undeviating route across the sky and she knew that the bombers were somehow following this rainbow route. Another parachute was falling behind her. It had something dangling on the end. She thought it was a paratrooper, that the Germans were actually going to land. The parachute swung hither and thither in perfect time to the beat of “Moonlight Serenade”. But then she saw that the parachute carried a cylindrical box, and after it disappeared behind the houses it rocked the earth with a fantastic blast that left Cassie’s ears ringing. She reached in her pocket and found the leather aviation helmet her airman had given her two nights ago, and she put it on, tying the strap under her chin.

  It was plain to her by now that each new cascade of incendiaries and explosives was coming down at approximately thirty-second intervals. That must have been the distance between each bank of planes, half-a-minute. She began to punctuate her movements accordingly.

  By the time she got to the cathedral there were small fires burning everywhere and crews of firemen putting them out. No sooner would they extinguish one small fire than another packet of incendiaries fell within yards. Cassie saw four men on the roof of the cathedral trying to put out the flames. She stood behind a policeman who stared up at the roof.

  The policeman glanced at her and, seeing her in her aviation helmet, took her to be a messenger. “Son, get down the Command Centre and tell ’em we need firemen here if we’re going to save it.”

  She was gone. She knew that Command Centre for Civil Defence was in the basement of the Council House. A Home Guard soldier stopped her at the door and said he’d pass the message along. “Don’t hold out much hope. The phone lines are gone already. Try to get a crew along yourself.”

  Cassie ran up Jordan Well. Another fire engine was active in Little Park Street, where a small factory was alight. A fireman was screwing his hose to a hydrant. Then another wave of bombs landed and three buildings went up like matchwood. An empty double-decker bus was turned on its nose to come crashing down, belly up, in a great groaning and splintering of metal. The fireman stopped what he was doing and stared at the destruction. Cassie had to tug his arm. “Cathedral,” she said. “They need you.”

  The fireman’s face was streaked with soot. “I can’t leave this,” he shouted above the thudding of anti-aircraft fire. “The entire block’ll go. Tell ’em I’ll come if I can.”

  Cassie ran back up Jordan Well. A crater had appeared in the road and an ambulance had driven into it. The driver was climbing out of his cab. Back at the cathedral the policeman was gone. There were still men on the roof, but acrid, yellow smoke writhed off it like fat worms making an escape from the conflagration. The men tore up the lead to get to the incendiaries that had fallen through to the timbers beneath. Cassie knew that they were wasting their time. She looked up in the air again and saw the sky was still filled with planes. They are riding on a secret beam, she thought. They can’t go anywhere else.

  More incendiaries came sniggering, metal clanging or thumping depending where they hit, all landing on the roof above the north door. From nearby came a massive, vibrating explosion. The men on the roof turned from their work to see where the newest parachuted land mine had hit. Then they went back to the scrabbling job of tearing up the lead. But the new basket of incendiaries had gone through and had taken hold. “Where’s the fucking firemen?” someone screamed.

&nbs
p; “Putting out the other fucking fires,” Cassie screamed back.

  The men on the roof looked down at her. Then one said. “We’re coming down. Help us save what’s inside.”

  The interior was choked with twisting yellow fumes. They all went in and saved what they could. Everything on the altar, some paintings, a couple of tapestries. But the cathedral was a museum of priceless medieval artworks. No one knew where to begin. Cassie rescued a gilt-framed painting of Lady Godiva. Within half an hour the smoke was overwhelming. One of the men put an arm out to stop Cassie going back in again. “It’s all over,” he said. “We don’t want to lose you as well.” One of the others, a young man, broke down in tears. They all stood together at the south porch and they watched the flames grow higher. Outside more explosions rocked the city. Inside, history burned and the jewel of the city melted.

  At about nine-thirty a group of firemen from Solihull battered their way through the rubble-strewn streets and set up hoses. When they trained water on the interior of the burning roof, violent billowing geysers of steam howled back at them in a reverse draught. There was a moment of hope before, without warning, the hoses stopped running, dribbled. The water mains had been hit. An exploding incendiary injured a policeman still involved in salvage. “It’s gone,” a voice said quietly.

  Another policeman put a hand on her shoulder. “Look sharp,” he said firmly. “The phones are down and they need more messengers over at Central.” Then he squinted at her. The giant red flames from the cathedral roof illuminated Cassie’s face. “Are you a lass?”

  “I’m a messenger,” Cassie said.

  “You’re a bloody angel.”

  She skipped away.

  The entire city was aflame. The fire crew on Little Park Street had given up and moved on, leaving the street burning, a row of three-storey scooped-out front walls. Cassie could see that Broadgate, the heart of the city, was spectacularly aflame. At the Council House Command Centre the soldier on duty recognized her this time and waved her through. She went down the stone steps to the basement. Three men and half a dozen women were chalking on blackboards or conferring. The telephone lines were still dead. They worked away under insipid yellow emergency lighting.