It was hairless, all facial features eroded except for the deep cavities of eyeholes. I do not think it still had any clothes or any real surface or skin. Like a statue that had been worn down by centuries of wind and rain, its outline had softened. A normally decaying human soon withered away to the bones, but this had irregularities that did not indicate a human skeleton but some other form of internal scaffolding entirely.
Its presence underground made a kind of sense. Rather than allowing a usable human body to crumble away, as Pierce’s was doing, the cadaver might be stored away against a time of need. And because the thing drew its energy from some alien source and had no need for food, or even air, a body could be buried for years or decades and brought to the surface at need.
As it clambered to its feet with unexpected agility, Skinner stuck his knife into the monster’s chest and twisted.
That was not what I would have done.
I did not see exactly what happened next, but I had an overall impression of the earth erupting all around. Pale, flickering forms wrenched themselves out of the ground on every side, creatures that jerked like landed fish but with a weird synchronised quality, like a modern ballet troupe all carrying out their peculiar actions in time to unheard music.
Skinner was struggling with the first one to emerge. His knife was embedded deeply where its heart should have been, but it was grappling with him with too-flexible arms. It was stronger than him.
I’d stepped forward to try and separate the combatants when another of them grabbed Skinner from behind. It was huge, a giant of a man, and did not have proper hands—they had been lost—but the ends of its arms were split open into crude pincers.
Brambles caught at me, and even the tree branches seemed to entangle my arms as I fought free, as though I was in the clutches of a nightmare sea anemone in an underwater scene. Whether it was really grabbing me or that was just my fancy, my strength was great enough to tear myself loose from the vegetation.
Several of the creatures were moving to intercept me as I strode towards Skinner. They moved uncertainly, though, as if they could only sense me by smell. That must have been the effect of my bubble of darkness.
I could not win against coordinated opponents, but against a pack of blind men, I had a chance, and there were knuckledusters on my fists.
I kicked the first one solidly in the midsection as it approached. There was a surprising weight and density to it. The creature was not a dried-up husk like a mummy but had more the mass and feel of a wet sandbag. I took two steps to the side as I regained my balance. The thing’s own weight worked against it, and it fell back and toppled heavily over a tree root.
They were strong but not light on their feet. As another one loomed ahead, I feinted to go around it first right, then left. It clumsily followed, and I seized it by the shoulders and gave it a powerful heave that continued the movement and overbalanced it into what was almost a cartwheel.
Even then, I was thinking of the fight in the Knyght’s Head and the tricky calculus of how many opponents there were, how far away they were, how quickly I could knock them down, and how long it would take them to get to their feet. Unless I was very swift indeed, I was going to get bogged down with fighting again.
I managed another three paces forward before my way was blocked by a smaller figure, the remnant perhaps of a woman or a child. It felt very much like a heavy punching bag to my fist, and while it flailed back, it lacked the speed or reach to connect with me. My blows, which should have felled a full-grown man, seemed to have no effect. I increased the power, and on the sixth or seventh strike to its torso, it folded and fell away as though something inside had broken.
Skinner was on his knees by that point. Two of the creatures had dragged him to the pool, and as one of them held his arms, the other forced his head down under the surface of the water.
I was knocked down by something pale and bulky, which came at me from one side. The blow had been pure chance, but it had the force of a battering ram. I rolled and got up to see something with a torso the size of a barrel looming over me. I did not look closely at it—I was careful to avoid looking at any of them—but I had the impression it was composed of three or more bodies mashed together as though their flesh was modelling clay. The ogrish form looked about and raised a thick arm towards me like a blind man feeling his way. Its hands were like rough spades.
Punching that monster would have been like striking a cliff face. Without hesitation, I threw the translucent yellow-brown pellet at it.
I expected the projectile to bounce off or maybe shatter, but instead, it merged with the creature as though they were both made of liquid. The effect was as though I had thrown a match on a scarecrow soaked in kerosene—there was a pulse of light, and the glow it emitted suddenly burned a hundred times brighter, breaking into purple-and-black flames. It burned where it stood, writhing like burning paper. The flame was fierce, like gas jets erupting from every inch of its body.
There was no heat that I could feel; all the energy was turned inwards, tearing the creature’s fabric into dust and smoke. It disintegrated as fast as if it had been a hollow figure made of dry newspaper.
I sensed rather than saw more of them zigzagging nearby. Another bulky figure even bigger than the last crashed through the undergrowth, heading straight at me. I sidestepped his charge easily, dodging behind the trunk of a tree, and tapped his ankle as he passed. He stumbled, missed his step, and went down heavily into a patch of brambles.
I strode over to where Skinner was still struggling feebly, his head fully submerged, held down by two great hulks with human form but without human features—faceless mannequins. Drawing in my breath, I focused my energies into a single point. I knew that a blow could break a wooden plank, and I would never have used it on a human opponent even without a knuckleduster. But this was a life-or-death situation. Without hesitation or thought, my fist flew as I delivered the secret Chinese blow, taught to me by Yang, to the head of the attacker holding Skinner’s face under water.
The thing’s head crumbled at the impact like a clod of hard earth under a sledgehammer. The decapitated body fell away as the fragments pattered into the water.
Skinner raised his face from the pool, gasping. Luminous water streamed from his hair.
I kicked the shoulder of the one holding Skinner’s arms. That should have broken some bones. In any event, it was enough to make the thing loosen its grip and turn around. At it tried to stand, I pivoted and kicked it in the chest, hard enough to leave a footprint, and it toppled back, its chest caved in.
Skinner squirmed free, splashing and staggering through the water. Another figure approached, but I knocked it down with a well-timed straight right. Their balance was poor as though they walked on stilts.
We fled. They tried to stop us, but the big ones were not agile enough, and the smaller ones were not strong enough or quick enough to hold us. Neither their clutches nor the ever-entangling undergrowth was a match for our desperation to escape, and we pelted blindly back the way we had come.
Away from the soft light of the oak, the darkness was complete, and it was like plunging into the warm embrace of a friendly ocean lit only by Skinner’s torch, shining the way ahead.
Our pursuers were not following the path but wading through the undergrowth. That slowed them but not by as much as I would have liked. As we approached the junction with the main path, I glimpsed something white ahead—a self-luminous man crawling along the ground, or attempting to crawl. He was caught up in the barbed wire, and his progress was hampered by the object that he carried tucked under one arm like a rugby ball.
The circle of the torchlight captured his upturned face. Pierce was barely recognisable in the degenerated features, but I knew it was him. The gardener had succeeded in stealing the idol and had made it this far, but his body was crumbling away. He was utterly spent. That was why the first of those alien undead had emerged from the earth—not to attack us, but to retrieve the idol.
“We’ll take that.” Skinner reached out with both hands, and bronze gleamed as he gently pulled the idol from under Pierce’s arm. Pierce was too weak to stop him but babbled at us as if several voices were trying to speak to us at once. Then the other voices subsided, and Pierce clutched my trouser cuff and spoke to me in a near whisper.
“They’re not devils,” he croaked. “They’re angels, fallen from heaven. Tell Evie. Tell her I’ve gone to heaven.”
The pursuers were crashing through the wood, a skirmish line of them beating their way and searching through the undergrowth. There seemed to be more of them now.
“Leave him,” urged Skinner.
I was thinking fast, putting together everything I had seen and heard—Stafford’s idea of the Holy Grail against Miss De Vere’s warning of alien infection, of lightning bolts and burning caravans, the colony of lepers put to the sword in Africa. I thought of the reason why they had encased the meteorite in metal in the first place. They must have wanted to preserve it in one piece so it could be transported.
“No,” I said. “We have to give it back to them.”
Skinner looked at me, dumbfounded, holding the idol in both hands. This was the prize that Stafford and Miss De Vere wanted and the only coin that Elsie Granger would accept for Sally’s safe return, but it did not belong to any of them.
Then he grinned. Perhaps, if he still had his knife and if I had not just saved him, he would have done differently. Skinner always said I should not trust him. But he grinned, enjoying the joke of it all.
“Why not?” he said and passed it to me.
The idol was as Miss Horniman had described it, and though the metal was smooth and slippery, I pulled the two halves apart in an instant.
The stone inside glowed as though it has been painted with radium. It was the size of a coconut and marked with ridges and pits as though pieces had been gouged from it. It was warm to the touch, and though it was heavy enough, it did not feel like a stone at all but more like a living thing, so yielding that I thought I could leave an impression with my finger. It might have been the cocoon of a monstrous insect.
Skinner gaped when he saw it, but I did not pause to look at the stone. That would be a bad mistake. Looking at things like that always was a mistake. That our brains were not equipped to assimilate some things was a truth I was beginning to appreciate, and being in mortal danger was not a good state for your mind to bite off more than it could chew.
I threw the baetyl with all my force back through the woods, towards the twisted oak. It vanished into the night. I could not hear it land because of the racket made by our pursuers, but a second later, silence fell suddenly over the forest.
“What now?” asked Skinner.
“Now we wait.” I wanted to ask Skinner whether he had swallowed any water. Still, there was nothing I could do if he had, and we would find out soon enough.
I shone a light on Pierce’s body. I could not identify a pulse, but I was convinced that he was not dead, or at least no deader than he had been a minute before—though he was probably not truly alive when he spoke his last words.
The air tingled as before an electrical storm. I was expecting thunderbolts, but none came. Instead, there was crackling from inside the woods like a bonfire and odd sparks of floating light that came and went. The popping and crackling rose and became continuous.
Something barrelled down the path towards us. I tensed, and my torch briefly shone in the terrified eyes of a fox before it bounded off, away from the pale, phosphorescent gyre that was climbing higher and higher into the sky.
At first, I thought it must be a forest fire, but the lights were not flames. They were more clusters of fireflies, whole squadrons of them, armadas of them. Every single animal and plant that was infected was crumbling into dust, yielding up its energies, and the pool must have boiled with strange light as the last vestiges were released from the subterranean pores.
“Like cosmic blooming carnival lights,” said Skinner.
Northern Lights were described as sheets and curtains of light that writhed across the night sky, and perhaps that was what we saw under the forest canopy. Or perhaps it was more like the St Elmo’s fire that Captain Hall spoke of so vividly, crawling along the masthead and the rigging, seemingly made of living light. The light certainly clung to the branches like rainwater. There was a sense of rotation too. The light was all caught up in a whirlpool or was creating a whirlpool itself, one that pulled itself up above the trees.
There was a sigh from my feet. A pale trickle of light flowed up towards the oak like a luminous eel. As it left Pierce, his body seethed and crumbled into dust. His body was surely dead, but as for the rest of him… if the essence of an alien being could move from a meteorite into water then into human flesh and back again into pure light, then perhaps some portion of a human being might make the same transition. As that flicker vanished into the woods, perhaps it really did take his soul with it. Bound, Pierce had probably been sure, for heaven.
“What have we done?” asked Skinner quietly. “What have we done?”
The crackling had grown so much by then that it was like the rushing of water, pure white noise, not loud but overwhelming, coming from everywhere at once.
The gyre had expanded, ballooning out towards us so it seemed close enough to touch. The surface was covered in crazy shifting patterns, some of them like leaves or branches, some like animal forms, and some, half glimpsed, like human faces. It spun faster and then extended upwards into a tall, narrow vortex.
The rotating cylinder climbed up itself, like ivy clambering over ivy, reaching upwards in waves. Twice it surged up only to slump down again. Each time, the light seemed to fade, but the third wave rolled upwards and upwards, extending high into the sky. The peak latched onto or bore through something as though some level of the firmament really was made of solid crystal. For a moment, the entire cyclone pulsed electric blue and thrummed as it drank deep from a fountain of lightning and replenished its energy.
Then the whole huge, whirling mass catapulted upwards, becoming a dart, a flaming arrow shot into the heavens, a shooting star passing out beyond the moon and vanishing in an eye-blink. We were left in darkness.
The after-image left me blinded for a minute. The noise in the woods did not die down at once but gradually faded as everything settled back into place after the big oak tree had finally become dust, branches, trunk, and roots, and the pool had disappeared back into the cavity.
“It’s gone,” I said at last.
“I bloody well hope so,” said Skinner.
Chapter Eighteen: Unfinished Business
Next day, Sunday morning, I walked into Norwood New Town at Arthur Renville’s side. There were no police on the gate, but it still had the feel of a prison camp. A deserted one. Everyone was sleeping off Saturday night.
“What a beautiful day,” said Arthur. He walked down the street as though he owned the place, or at least was considering putting in an offer. “God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world, wouldn’t you say, Stubbsy?”
Arthur was a happy man. He had secured a large consignment of cigarettes, written off as waterlogged, and had confirmed that the majority were of a saleable quality. The night before, he had been busy ensuring that boxes and boxes of cigarettes all found secure homes, which was not an easy thing with a negotiable commodity such as tobacco. He would be going to bed in an hour or two.
I made some noncommittal reply.
“Don’t you worry.” He patted my arm. “We’ll get everything sorted out here.”
When I had come to Arthur, I had half expected he’d get on the blower and assemble an army to descend on Norwood New Town mob-handed with pick-axe handles for weapons. But he had insisted that the two of us would be more than enough.
Arthur was a friendly, reassuring presence. If he said the sun would shine tomorrow, you knew it was so. If Skinner said the same thing, you would still wonder about taking an umbrella.
Skinner had gone as soon as the events in the forest were concluded. From the woods, he had headed directly to the fairground with just the clothes he wore and the money in his pocket. He wanted me to go with him.
“Nobody cares about your name or your past in a fair,” he said. “Nobody asks to see your papers. You disappear. And there’s plenty a chap like you could do—you’d be a first-class strongman act. Shave your head and grow a beard, and nobody would recognise you. You’d do well enough as a mucker—you could do the work of three other blokes. But if you go back, your life ain’t worth a bent farthing; you know that.”
I had turned him down, not without regrets. While Skinner could run away, I needed to face up to things, not the least of which was Sally’s kidnapping.
The Knyght’s Head was closed and shuttered with no sign of life. Arthur strolled around to the side door, listened for a minute, and then rapped on it twice.
After a minute, a boy opened the door wide enough to look suspiciously at us. He was about half my height with dishevelled hair and a stained shirt several sizes too big for his undersized frame. He waited for us to speak.
“Would you be so good as to give this to Miss Elsie?” said Arthur, passing a business card through the narrow opening. “We’ll be at the front door when she’s ready.”
Having taken the card, the boy shut the door again. We sauntered back to the front. The place had the aspect of a bunker. Broken glass crunched underfoot. The side door opened again, and I heard running feet. The boy had been sent on an errand.
“A very fine morning,” Arthur repeated, gazing into the cloudless sky. “Look, you can see the swallows flying up there.”
Five minutes later, there were more footsteps around at the side door; the summoned reinforcements had arrived. Shortly afterwards, the front door opened, and Elsie Granger herself stood inside with arms folded, squinting into the bright sun.
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 19
