The conference continued in non-stop session. Various delegates, exhausted, would go for a rest in the small but comfortable bedrooms provided. Often they’d sleep, and when they slept they often dreamed of Reputation One. Some even had nightmares about it. Later, rested, they’d return. Food would be brought in at regular intervals by some of the cold-eyed young men. The talk never stopped. They talked hot air, but then politicians are used to that. They even find a kind of comfort in it: it makes them feel they’re doing something. The number of people arriving into the country grew, and the army and police at the site of the Bubble lost even more control. But at the conference, attended by experts on everything, who’d come from everywhere, nothing changed. Until around midday on Saturday. When everything did.
By Saturday morning the scenes around the perimeter of The Phenomenon had gone well beyond the point where they could be described as chaotic. The word ‘chaos’ no longer did them justice. By now almost three million people surrounded the baseof the Big Bubble. The police and army had abandoned all serious efforts at crowd-control. They’d been reduced to firing volleys in the air over people’s heads, and even these were gradually growing less effective as a deterrent.
The camp at Doulapown had by now grown into a shanty-city with an estimated eighty-five thousand residents. The number of churches and temples had grown to twenty-eight, the number of illegal bars to a hundred and seventy-five. The Big Bubble frenzy had not died – it had intensified intensely.
Just before midday the main conference room under Government Buildings in Dublin was completely silent. It was the first time it had been so quiet since the initial meeting on Tuesday. The silence, brief but deep, had been caused by the senior United States security representative, General Tubb. The general, frustrated by four days of failure to penetrate the barrier at all, had made what he considered a very practical suggestion. From the silence, the white faces and the way everyone else stared goggle-eyed at him, he suspected that not everyone shared his opinion.
‘I didn’t mean a big nuclear bomb,’ he hastened to reassure them. ‘I only meant a teensie one. We drop it right on top of that old bubble’ – he demonstrated with his cigar – ‘and BOOM! – no more bubble. It might just work, and I happened to bring one over on the plane with me that would be just the right size. I never go anywhere without one – you never know when it might come in handy.’
The explanation didn’t seem to please anyone at all. Finally the Irish Minister for Defence, who looked more than drained after four days of intense pressure, dragged himself to his feet.
‘General, we’ve proven,’ he said, speaking quite slowly, as one might to a small child, ‘that things bounce off The Phenomenon. Throw something at the haze, it rebounds at almost exactly twice the speed. That’s one of the few definite facts about it that we’ve managed to establish.’
‘So?’
‘So, General, what if your bomb doesn’t explode? What if it rebounds and lands on Belfast or Galway?’ He pointed directly overhead. ‘General, what if it drops right here on Dublin?’
General Tubb looked puzzled. He glanced narrowly at the ceiling. ‘You mean this place isn’t nuke-proof?’ he asked suspiciously.
There was a knock at the door. There was something odd about the knock. The cold-eyed young men always knocked before entering, but even their knocks were cold-eyed: a steely, professional Rat-Tat that they all seemed to use, as though they’d all learned it at the same school. This knock was different. It consisted of five raps in a rhythm some of the room’s occupants would have called shave-and-a-haircut. It sounded almost cheerful.
The conference delegates looked at each other.
‘Come in,’ called the Minister for Defence.
The door swung open and an unlikely figure peered in at them apologetically. It was a fat little old woman with blue-rinsed hair. A pale pink cardigan hung around her shoulders. Horn-rimmed glasses hung on a chain around her neck. Her hands were empty, held out palms upwards.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said. ‘But I thought you’d like to know that you can stop worrying now. We’ve almost finished what we came to do, and our exclusion zone will be removed before midnight.’
At first no one heard what she said. Seeing her there was so unlikely that the delegates hardly even noticed her. Instead they all looked past her, to where a pile of cold-eyed well-groomed young men wearing ear-pieces and shiny shoes lay, neatly and rigidly, stacked like so much firewood against the corridor wall behind her. They all looked very dead.
22. The Little Fat Woman
The little fat woman smiled at the conference delegates. Then she noticed where their attention was directed. She glanced back at the neat stack of cold-eyed young men.
‘Oh, your guards!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. But they didn’t want me to come in. They’ll be fine later, and they’ll remember none of this.’
Now the delegates’ eyes did swivel in her direction. They stared at her blankly. There had been twenty highly-trained security men in the corridor. This little woman looked incapable of disabling anything more fearsome than a reasonably well-built plastic bag. Still, the security men lay there, and the little fat woman said she’d done it, and she wasn’t even out of breath.
The little fat woman seemed to read their minds. She smiled cheerfully.
‘You mustn’t be taken in by my appearance,’ she said. ‘I’m what you might call a master of disguise.’
And she gave a little giggle, as though at some private joke.
The delegates’ eyes followed the little fat woman as she walked up the room to the podium, where the Irish Minister for Defence stood with his mouth slightly open. As the woman reached the top of the room, General Tubb suddenly rose and blocked her way. He stood glaring down at the little fat woman.
‘Say,’ he said, ‘what’s the meaning of this?’
The little woman looked directly up into the General’s blue eyes. She seemed to read some message there.
‘Dearie me,’ she said. ‘I can see there’ll be no use in talking to you.’
She made a delicate little gesture with one hand. General Tubb sat down hard on the floor and stayed there, perfectly still. The little fat woman stepped around him. The delegates closest to the general stared at his sitting form. One of them waved a hand close to the General’s face. He didn’t blink. Another reached out a nervous hand and prodded at the General with his finger. The General tottered, overbalanced and fell on his back. His body didn’t bend. His legs stuck straight up in the air. The delegates stared in disbelief.
The little fat woman reached the podium.
‘You may as well sit down,’ she said kindly to the Minister for Defence.
The Minister for Defence nodded.
‘I suppose I may as well,’ he said. He sounded dazed.
The little fat woman looked around the room. Every eye was fixed on her. She nodded.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘my business here is simple. I’ve already told you what I came to say. Your worries are over. We will be removing our barrier – what you call The Phenomenon – very shortly. We would like to apologise for the inconvenience. Believe me, we’d much rather none of this had happened. If we had any other way of dealing with the situation then I assure you we would have done so.’
Someone among the delegates found their voice. It was a fairly strangled voice, but it was clear enough.
‘Wh-what situation?’ it asked.
‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.’
Encouraged, someone else piped up.
‘You say “we”. Who are “we”? Who are you?’
A frosty little smile touched the woman’s lips.
‘Me? Why, I’m no one in particular. As regards “we”, well …’
She hesitated.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said the Minister for Defence, ‘you’re not at liberty to say, right?’
‘It would take a long time,’ said the little fat woman. ‘A very long
time. And you might be happier not knowing.’
‘But I want to know!’ the Minister said, his voice rising a few octaves. ‘Whoever you are, you can’t just hive off part of my country, cause an international panic, then simply turn up and say it’s all over and you’re sorry for the inconvenience!’
The little fat woman smiled at him coyly. Her eyes positively twinkled.
‘I can, you know,’ she said.
She turned and, selecting a spot on the wall right behind her, walked right through it and was gone. In her wake the conference room degenerated into bedlam. Which, admittedly, it had never been very far from anyway.
PART THREE: The Fix-It Men
23. The Dead Coach
‘I want this to stop,’ Kirsten said.
‘It’s not going to stop,’ Stephen said, trying to sound calmer than he felt. ‘All we can do now is see it through to the end.’
‘I don’t want to know what the end is. I want it all to go away now.’
Stephen stared at the scene outside. The monks were moving back slowly, recoiling as the reality of what they were seeing sank in.
‘I want to run away and hide too,’ he said. ‘But there’s nowhere to go.’
‘Then I just want to curl up and die,’ Kirsten said.
He looked at her. Her eyes were wide, registering something way beyond horror.
‘I’m going out there,’ he said.
‘You’re mad!’ she whispered.
He shook his head.
‘They need all the support they can get,’ he said firmly. ‘And I doubt there’s one of them out there less terrified than we are.’
But Kirsten was already backing away from the window, one hand thrown up in front of her face as though to protect her from the sight of the scene outside. She was shaking her head.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please, don’t go out.’
But he was already going, forcing himself put one foot in front of the other.
As he went down the stairs he heard feet running, and when he got outside he saw that the scene there had changed. Thomas’s nerve had finally cracked, and he was running in panic across the courtyard towards the doorway of the bell-tower. The little pistol lay on the ground where he’d dropped it. The three monks remaining stood facing the car. Philip, his right hand shaking visibly, held his pistol up in front of him, aiming it at the driver, who opened the door and casually got out. Stephen crossed to stand beside the abbot, keeping his eyes on the driver, unwilling to look at the headless passenger in the front seat.
The man who got out of the car was small and slight. He brushed down his suit and straightened his tie. The thin face under the dark hat was smooth and reserved, and his pale eyes looked at them shrewdly as he stood away from the car. His hands, hanging at his sides, were empty. He held them out, palms up, as though in token of peaceful intent.
‘Good morning,’ he said pleasantly in a clear voice. He took his hat off and held it in front of him. The morning sun shone on his thinning sandy hair. He looked terribly ordinary. It was hard to believe he could be a party to such terror.
Nobody answered his greeting. He looked around thoughtfully at their tense faces. The three monks stood like statues, apart from Philip’s quivering hand. Simon’s face was every bit as impassive as the driver’s. He held his gun trained on the car, steady as a rock.
The driver completed his survey of their faces. His eyes turned to Philip. He nodded at the black pistol wavering in the big man’s hand.
‘Be careful with that,’ he said mildly. ‘You might blow a hole in something.’
‘In you, maybe,’ Philip said. The bravado of his words rang hollow. The driver smiled a smile that was actually quite pleasant.
‘Very possibly,’ he said. ‘And that would be inconvenient. I have work to do, and I can’t do without a body just yet.’
He spoke with no suggestion of threat. It was only his words that sounded crazy.
‘Who are you people, and what do you want?’ demanded the abbot.
The man looked at him, still smiling.
‘I’ll be happy to satisfy your curiosity,’ he said. ‘But right now I was hoping that you could lend some unfortunate travellers some assistance. As you can see, we’ve had a little accident.’
He gestured with his hat towards the interior of the car. A little accident! There was something almost brutal about the phrase when you considered what he was obviously referring to.
‘I wonder,’ the man said, ‘whether you’d have a quiet place where my friend could rest for a little while. Just a small time, to recuperate. After that I’ll be only too pleased to answer any questions you have.’
His demeanour made the whole situation seem quite unreal. His words didn’t help. In the real world people don’t ‘recuperate’ after being beheaded.
The abbot was having trouble keeping control of himself. You could hear it in his voice. But the stranger’s request had at least put the situation into some kind of familiar context.
‘Forgive my manners,’ he said. ‘You must realise that your appearance is … unusual, to say the least.’
‘Of course. I quite understand. But now – I don’t wish to seem hasty, but the sooner I can tend to my friend, the sooner we can sort all this out.’
‘God almighty!’ Philip’s interruption was an angry croak. Looking at his face, Stephen realised that it must have taken all of his willpower not to run away with the novice.
‘You’re not going to let these … these things stay here, are you?’ Philip demanded of the abbot.
‘I get the impression,’ Paul said dryly, ‘that I don’t have a great deal of choice in the matter.’
He looked at the driver, who shrugged.
‘Well,’ the man said, ‘I don’t think any of us have. This is an unfortunate business, but it needs to be sorted out. The sooner it’s sorted, the happier I’m certain all of us will be. You can’t sort it. We can – it’s what we’re here for. So sooner or later you’ll have to deal with us, and sooner or later we’ll have to deal with you. We may as well go about it in a civilised fashion.’
Paul looked at him. Then he nodded.
‘Put up your guns,’ he said to the other two monks.
Brother Simon obeyed after only a slight hesitation. But Philip’s weapon stayed where it was, aimed shakily at the driver’s chest. The man looked sniffily at the gun, but when he spoke to Philip his voice was almost apologetic.
‘I’m afraid I can’t let you kill me,’ he said. ‘As I’ve told you, it would be inconvenient.’
‘Philip!’ Paul said sharply. ‘Put it down!’
Philip lowered the pistol reluctantly. His face wasn’t so much white as colourless. It shone with a sheen of sweat. His whole body shivered violently.
The abbot spoke quietly to the driver.
‘There are bedrooms upstairs, to your left,’ he said. ‘We’ll put your friend in one of them.’
‘That would be perfect,’ the driver said. He looked into the car, at the thickset man in the back seat.
‘Help my friend,’ he said curtly. There was nothing mild in his voice now.
The big man got out of the car. He looked around him with distaste. He opened the front passenger door and took the arm of the headless man, who climbed out carefully. Watching him with reluctant fascination, Stephen felt the fear moving in his bowels. They called this thing a man, but it couldn’t be a man – headless men are dead men, and this thing wasn’t dead. Beside him he heard Philip give a low moan.
The headless man carried a plastic bag in one hand. The bag was bloody, and it bulged with something solid, something about the size of a human head.
The driver looked around at them.
‘It’s only an injured body,’ he said gently. ‘I’m going to fix it, that’s all. That’s what we’re here for, to fix things. We’re fix-it men.’
He looked to the abbot, who gestured towards the doorway leading into Stephen’s wing of the abbey.
> ‘This way,’ he said.
He led the way inside, followed by the driver and then, more slowly, by the thickset man and the headless one. Those in the courtyard stood looking after them, even after they’d disappeared inside. Then the old monk went off towards the bell-tower, looking for the vanished novice. Stephen stood there stupidly, looking around at the car and the abandoned guns lying on the ground. Behind him, Philip said something he didn’t catch. He turned around.
‘What?’ he said.
Philip’s eyes had been fixed on the car. When Stephen spoke they turned towards him. Stephen had seen that wild-eyed look more than once now, but never like this. These were truly madman’s eyes.
‘The dead coach,’ Philip said.
The gun in his hand swung up. He held it at the level of his hip, pointed straight at Stephen.
‘First the fetch,’ Philip said, ‘and now the dead coach and its headless rider.’
Stephen remembered what the abbot had said the night before, that the fetch was his double. What the dead coach or the headless rider might be, he had no idea.
He was terribly aware of the gun in Philip’s hand. This was the second time in less than forty-eight hours that the big monk had pointed that gun at him. Yesterday he’d come close to pulling the trigger, but he’d thought better of it; today, to judge by his mad eyes, he wasn’t thinking at all.
Stephen licked his lips
‘Philip,’ he said carefully, ‘I swear I know nothing about this. Kirsten and I are as frightened as everyone else.’
Philip stood stiff and unmoving for a moment longer. Stephen could see a sneer forming on his lips.
Then he hit Stephen.
While the boy was watching his face, the monk swung the gun up and hit him in the side of the head with it. It wasn’t a heavy blow, but Stephen was stunned, as much by the surprise as by the blow itself. For one moment he thought he’d been shot. He saw stars. When his vision cleared he looked up to see Philip walking away. Stephen stood blinking after him, dazed, his eyes smarting and an ache in his skull. He was suddenly angry. He was a boy; Philip was a man, over six feet tall and built to match. Fear or no fear, he was simply a bully. He wasn’t going to do anything like that to Stephen again.
Out of Nowhere Page 9
