by Paul Meloy
David wasn’t on the bus. Everything was different.
“SO I HAD to toughen up,” Sandy said. “No option. Look at me now.”
“You’re a brute, Uncle Sandy.”
“Heart of gold. Just don’t get in my way.”
“Does Aunty Jean know all this?”
“Of course. No secrets from my Jean.”
Railgrinder clattered through an abandoned station, past a derelict kiosk and a waiting room hung with faded posters. Signal boxes filled with cobwebbed levers. A station clock hanging from an ornate iron bracket, its rusting hands frozen at ten past three.
They travelled in silence for a while and then Sandy said, “There she is.”
Alex was unsure for a moment what Sandy was referring to. For a wild half-second he expected to see Aunty Jean standing at the side of the line, silver hair shining in the glamour of Railgrinder’s shearing stardust.
But instead, he saw lights.
“Quay-Endula,” said Sandy. We’re home.”
QUAY-ENDULA WAS EVERYTHING Alex had imagined it to be. It sprawled around the bay like all the jewels ever mined poured in profligate adoration about the throat of the most indulged woman in the world. Even at night—or perhaps especially—it was magnificent. The esplanades and pavilions were lit with gleaming spotlights; cyclopean viaducts, cable car pylons, funicular railways bestrode the Quay and the parks glittered with delicate, twinkling installations, a million coloured bulbs strung through the night. And the pier, stretching to a point towards the horizon, white light blazing from the arcades and stalls all along its length, the spinning colours of its electrifying rides, the stately revolution of its immense wheel there at the end of the pier, the specks of tiny gondolas visible like a constellation rotating against the night sky.“Looks good to me, “Sandy said.
“Are we stopping here?”
“No, we go on. There’s a beach beyond that cliff. We’re needed there.”
“Who by?”
“The rest of us,” Sandy said, and opened the throttle.
RAILGRINDER STOPPED UNDER the moon on a curve of track above a secluded cove. Sandy closed the firebox and dropped the iron latch. He reached down, beneath the furnace, and pulled something out. It was a long, narrow tube. It was his glass-blowing tube. He held it up, closed one eye and looked down its length. He put it to his lips and puffed. A gritty cloud of soot blew from the end. He wiped his mouth.
“Right. Ready?” He said.
“Ready,” Alex replied.
Together they climbed down from the cab and walked the short distance to the steps that led down to the bay.
There was a fire blazing halfway down the beach. Alex could make out silhouettes, a knot of figures moving in the firelight. He gripped Sandy’s wrist.
“It’s okay,” Sandy said. “They’re with us.”
They crossed the dark, damp sand and walked towards the figures. One of them broke away from the huddle and approached them.
“Hello, old friend,” he said. He was a huge man. Tall and blond and heavily muscled.
“Hello, Jon,” Sandy said. The men embraced.
“Jon Index, this is Alex,” Sandy said.
The big man reached out a hand. Alex took it and they shook. Alex was only able to grasp two of the man’s fingers in his fist.
“Come over. She’s close.” Index said.
They went over to the others. The sea slid over the sand with a sound like secrets being given up in remorse.
They clustered around a woman. She was unconscious. She was breathing in shallow gasps. A young man knelt by her side and soothed her.
“Alex, this is Claire and her husband, Steve Iden. That man watching the horizon is Mick Reeks.” Steve Iden looked up; his eyes were tired, red-rimmed in the firelight. “Hi, fella,” he said.
Index took Sandy’s arm and they walked off a few yards, into the shadows beyond the firelight. Alex looked down at the woman. She was pregnant, her belly rising and falling with her breathing.
Sandy and Index came back to the light after exchanging words.
The man who had been standing off towards the shore was also coming back. He was small and wiry, with glasses and short, curly hair.
“They’re coming,” he said.
All eyes turned towards the horizon.
They could hear them before they could see anything, a growing shriek of engines. And then dark smudges on the water and in the air. As they approached their weak lights broke through the darkness over the water.
“Toyceivers.” Index said.
Sandy lifted his glass blowing tube, his jaw set. He walked towards the shoreline.
Alex watched. The woman moaned. Steve caressed her cheek, her brow. He put the palm of his hand on her belly.
“Come on, Claire,” he whispered.
“Alex, I need you,” Sandy called.
Alex followed his uncle and stood by his side.
“What do you need me to do?”
Sandy put the tube to his lips and bent his head towards the ground. He twisted his wrists and plunged the other end of the tube into the soaked, mildly wallowing sand.
“Put your hands on the back of my head. And don’t be afraid.”
Alex stood behind Sandy and raised his arms. His hands looked small and cold in the moonlight. Sandy bunched his shoulders and took an enormous breath.
“Now,” he said.
Alex put his palms against the smooth dome of his uncle’s head, and waited.
BIX STOPPED READING.
He looked at Chloe. She was asleep. Her eyes moved behind her trembling lids and her face was set in an expression of gentle peace. The walls of the cave were rippling in the candle light, contracting.
Bix stood up and stretched. It was dark outside. He could hear the sound of the wind in the treetops. It sounded like the ocean. Bix could smell the sea on the air.
He nuzzled the girl, licked her cheek.
“Good luck, kid,” he said. Bix trotted the length of the cave and looked down. The ladder was still there. He jumped, hitting the top step with his front paws and let balance, momentum and a bit of trust in good things get him to the forest floor. He stood at the bottom of the ladder and breathed deeply. And then he set off, through the forest, across the meadow, following the scent of the sea.
THE TIGER-RIDE TOOK Trevena and Anna through a ruined place.
They bounded through a bombsite, past blasted buildings and along wrenched and twisted roads. Factories leaned walls of disintegrating masonry across a road where the shell of a gasometer still burned behind them, its stanchions twisted and buckled, flutes of blue gas like the tails of a fleet of rocket ships blazing from its fractured pipelines.
At last they reached a district that was more or less intact. Bronze John took them through back streets lined with terraces and boarded-up corner shops. Trevena watched their reflection flash by in the unlit windows of the houses. The tiger was a racing orange fuse, burning through their vacant parlours.
They rounded a corner, and Trevena knew where he was.
There was the shop, with the pillars and the checkerboard step. He had run from here, a prisoner in his own body as Cade had emerged. He had left Daniel here after attacking him. Bronze John slowed to a walk. He stopped at the entrance to the shop, those big glass doors with their long brass handles.
Trevena got down and stood on shaking legs. He reached up and lifted Anna from the tiger’s back. The three of them stood in the silence of the back street and waited.
They heard the sound of an engine.
Two cones of light splashed across the road.
They watched as a campervan followed its headlights around the corner and drove up the street towards them.
TREVENA FELT BOTH sheepish and vastly relieved when the campervan stopped and Daniel climbed out. The driver, a short, thickset man in his sixties, joined him at the kerb.
Trevena stepped forward. “Daniel, I’m so sorry, mate,” he said.
Daniel held up a hand. “It
’s fine, Phil, really. I should have protected you better. It was my fault.”
They shook hands.
Daniel introduced Babur and then paced in front of the shop while Trevena explained what had happened to him at the castle, about the death of Cade and the rescue of Anna. Anna stood by Bronze John, her hand stroking his neck.
“I’m happy he’s gone,” Daniel said, referring to Cade. “Filthy bastard.”
The men conferred, agreeing that they should travel together and try to get back to Chloe. The immediate danger from Cade had passed, but the incursions were increasing and Daniel said he could sense the power of the Autoscopes growing.
They climbed into the campervan. Babur drove, Daniel next to him in the passenger seat. Anna and Trevena sat in the back on the rock and roll bench with Bronze John curled up, seeming smaller now, on the rugs spread over the floor at their feet. Trevena had noticed how Daniel and Babur were unfazed by the presence of the tiger. Maybe they had seen stranger things. And hadn’t he accepted the attendance of Bronze John with the same unquestioning diffidence? It was that common experience of dreams, he concluded; a universal openness to quantum improbabilities. Time and familiarity took infinite liberties, he thought. He wondered idly whether there was an equation for it.
Trevena took in the strange arrays of switches and bulbs cobbled to the fittings in the back of the van. The screens and dials. It all looked very retro to Trevena, all form and no function, like a child’s mock-up of a space lab. There was a touching innocence to it.
“What’s all this gear do?” He asked. “You got a coffee maker in there?”
Babur started to explain about tracking systems, detectors and modified EMPs, with what, Trevena discerned, was a touch of mild defensiveness, but just as Trevena was starting to switch off, Daniel leaned forward in his seat and groaned. He clutched his head.
Babur stopped talking and pulled the van over. “What is it?” He asked.
“I can hear him,” Daniel said.
“Who?”
“Les. My friend. There’s trouble. Bad trouble. It’s an incursion. A big one.” He was gasping, the words coming staccato through his teeth.
“Tell me where to go,” Babur said.
“I need Dr. Natus,” Daniel said.
“No you don’t,” Babur said. “He was nothing but a projection. A totem. You created him out of your unconscious to give you faith, confidence. You don’t need him anymore.”
Babur swung the van back onto the road.
“Take us there,” he said.
Daniel sat back against the seat, his eyes closed.
“Shut your eyes,” he said. “All of you.”
THE VAN ACCELERATED, and then it was drifting, as abruptly as if it had gone off a cliff. There was no sense of drop, just a loss of contact with a surface, but it was unsettling enough to make Trevena moan and squeeze his eyes shut against the urge to look at what was happening.
The sound of the van’s engine was muffled, and through his eyelids Trevena perceived a rippling flow of light.
And then the van was back on solid ground. The tyres squealed and they were thrown forward in their seats. Trevena did open his eyes then, and saw that Anna was curled up on the floor against the curve of Bronze John’s belly, her eyes squeezed shut.
He looked out of the window and could see they were on a street curving through a village. It was night here, too, and he could see lights blazing on a corner up ahead.
“Pull in on the left up there,” Daniel said. He pointed through the windscreen at a parking area beside a large building.
Babur pulled the van in and switched off the engine. The three men got out and walked back to the road. Anna stayed in the camper with the tiger. Bronze John’s eyes were narrow but alert. He quivered with energy, prepared to act if called upon.
Trevena could see that they were in a pub car park. The sign outside the building read, The Dog with its Eyes Shut. The door was open and he could hear voices raised inside.
Across the road a crowd was gathered. They stood on a vacant lot surrounding the collapsed shell of a building. Arc lights running from a generator were pointed down into the ruins. They made the rubble look like great ingots of silver. The group was comprised of men, all carrying weapons. Some were makeshift but Trevena could see shotguns and someone had a crossbow. They went across and joined the crowd.
One of the men came around from the side of the building and Trevena watched, mouth open, a feeling of wonder coursing through him.
Les waved.
Trevena stepped forward and met him. They shook hands, Trevena grinning, their profiles starkly lit by the arc lights. Daniel came over with Babur.
“How bad is it?” Daniel asked Les.
Les ran a hand across his face. He looked over towards the derelict building.
“It collapsed this morning,” he said. “Just dropped away into a sinkhole. We’ve been guarding it since then. Something came out of it mid-afternoon but we beat the shit out of it. Since we’ve had the lights on all we can hear is movement and some voices but we’ve not seen anything else.”
“Have you got the body?”
“No. It just rotted away. It had a lot of legs and a lot of teeth, though. A lot.”
Babur pointed at a sign lying broken amidst the rubble and dirt. It had fallen from the wall when the building collapsed.
“The Night Clock,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
Daniel nodded. “It was a big fucking clue and I wasn’t even aware.”
“Projections,” said Babur, and clapped Daniel on the shoulder. “You knew, son. You were keeping people safe. You were doing your job.”
Daniel shook his head.
“Have we lost anyone?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Les said. “Couple of minor injuries but nothing serious.”
Trevena looked back across the road. The door to the pub was shut now. He looked up at the night sky. It was clear, a crisp, inscrutable black, and without moon or stars. How could skies be so different? Trevena wondered, but then he had to factor that this was Daniel’s Quay, or a dimension of it, and everything he knew about dreams from his training, from his psychotherapy, specified that it was all a projection of the dreamer’s identity. The reddish light that limned the roofs of the pub and the cottages opposite intrigued Trevena though, and so he stepped away from the crowd and walked further down the road to see what was casting it. When he saw what was rising above the rooftops his flesh began to creep.
It was Mars.
The planet rose as he watched, and cast red shadows. It was huge, a muddy red arc lifting from behind the houses. Trevena stretched out his arms and tried to measure it. He closed one eye, to flatten the perspective. His fingertips were three feet apart and the planet hung between them. It was rising so fast that his arms rose with it.
He craned his neck and looked back at the crowd of men. Les was watching him.
“Mars,” he said. “The god of war.”
Trevena had time to look back up at the baleful face of the dead planet before the shouting started over at the face of the sinkhole and a great swarm of creatures blew up from its depths and set upon the men.
THE MEN FELL back and battle raged in the street. They were like birds, these things, but venomous. They had stings like needles unsheathed from their abdomen and they flew on noisy, throbbing wings. They had scissoring, serrated beaks and each one contained a wick of diffuse light that irritated the back of the eye like a scratch.
The men waded into them, swinging clubs and shovels. A shotgun fired and a swath of the stinging birds evaporated. They smashed them out of the air, grinding the fragile bodies beneath their boots.
Someone pressed a tyre-iron into Trevena’s hands and he had time to swipe it blindly as something darted into his periphery. The iron connected with one of the birds and it burst mid-air, in a shower of brownish light and glass. Trevena waved the iron in front of him and saw Daniel, Les and Babur, each one now
armed with similar improvised weapons, dashing birds to splinters at the edge of the ruins.
Trevena heard someone scream. A man was down, two of the birds beating at his face. Trevena ran across but it was too late. He winced as one of the birds curled its abdomen and jabbed its sting into the man’s right eye. The man screamed again, but by an order of magnitude greater than before. His eye bulged as it filled with the blue toxin and he staggered back, clutching at his face. The second bird lanced the back of his hand and it immediately turned black and softened to a paste that he dragged, bubbling, down his face. He rolled on the ground, throat swollen, now unable to scream, as his eye ballooned from its socket.
“Someone help this man,” Trevena shouted, but there was no one able to assist. Trevena knelt and put his hands flat on the writhing man’s chest. He spoke to him, calming words, told him he wasn’t alone, did his best to comfort him, but the man was already dead, his eye blown in a syrup down his cheek.
“Shit,” Trevena muttered. He stood and raised the tyre-iron, horribly vigilant to the possibility of the same thing happening to him.
The shouts of battle continued around him but there were a lot less birds left to kill. They had been beaten out of the air by the fury and force of the crowd. Men roamed the road and the ground surrounding the sinkhole and took out the last of the birds with their tools and their guns.
For a moment there was silence. The whole street seemed to breathe as the chests of the men took in draughts of the night air, and all were watchful. Mars was above them, its canals visible on its surface like scars on a warrior’s cheek.
And then, from the sinkhole, a clattering as something fast scaled it, and a piercing whine echoing up from its depths as engines fired and machines began to ascend.
Trevena and Les stood at the edge of the ruins and looked down. The arc lights scooped a deep, bright gutter out of the darkness. Trevena experienced a sharp crackle of vertigo in his belly and down the backs of his legs. He leaned against the parapet of sundered brickwork and closed his eyes.
