The Power

by Ian Watson

  Before she could touch the flush lever, the rounded head of the shit rose up, questing like a water snake’s. It surged into the U-bend, followed by the entire uncoiling sausage. Away it swam! Up through still water, before she could flush it!

  It must have hit the bottom of the bowl with some sort of – ha, energy of motion! An almost muscular energy which had bounced it back up and away.

  How could…?

  The water wouldn’t really have been still. She’d already flushed the toilet after peeing. The currents in bath water circulated for hours after the taps were turned off; hadn’t Gareth once mentioned that? Likewise water in a toilet bowl.

  So small a pool could whisk so much crap away like a leaf?

  She felt fearfully sick. If that thing could swim away of its own accord, mightn’t it swim back again? Maybe … rear up out of the bowl?

  She pressed the flush. Waited. Pressed again. Then she fled downstairs.

  Strangely, she still felt desperate for a crap. Pressure mounted in her bowels. Pain cramped her abdomen. She didn’t dare go up and sit on that seat again so soon.

  Carol – Oxford Carol – had worked part of one long vac as a chamberMald in the Randolph. She’d told Jeni about one loony woman guest who stayed shut in her room for weeks and wouldn’t let the maids in morning or evening. “Seen to it all myself!” she shouted through the door when anyone knocked. Well, no maid was going to fight for the privilege of extra work. Finally a smell began to slink into the corridor.

  It turned out that the woman had shat into newspapers. She’d rolled up her turds and filled drawers with them, drying.

  Jeni wouldn’t have thought of a solution otherwise. As yet she hadn’t opened any curtains. Feeling like a madwoman herself, she spread a copy of the free paper, the Churtington & District Advertiser, on the amber lino. Jerking her jeans down, she squatted.

  None too soon. Soft dark brown crap rushed out, smelly chunks with bits of day-old peanut embedded.

  It took three sheets of kitchen roll to wipe herself clean. Quite a load she’d dropped. A steaming heap. Utterly unlike the other.

  It was then Jeni realized that the long coil of yellow matter which had swum away earlier – that thing like a yard of pale unsegmented sausage in a butcher’s window – couldn’t possibly have come out of her anus….

  It had come out of… her other opening.

  Terrified, she folded the Advertiser over, slid her parcel into a plastic bag and hurried it out to the dustbin.

  The sewage downpipe was gurgling, endowed with a voice: the voice of something inside the pipe, slurping and glutinous. Presently the noises transferred themselves to the drains underfoot.

  It was as if she’d become fully pregnant overnight with a deformity, child of a nightmare she’d forgotten. She’d given birth that morning to a pale boneless limb. Now the limb was loose in the village. By way of the drains, it could slide anywhere it wanted.

  “What nonsense! Nonsense!” Jeni’s cry startled a blackbird from the fence. She’d been hallucinating. Could some of that acid still be lodged in her system after all these years, locked inside brain cells? Unlikely.

  Maybe the acid had unlocked a door in her mind which .was now a swing-door. A strong enough wind could blow the door open at any time; such as the wind from an F-111, such as the wind of rage.

  She hurried indoors to drink more coffee, char a slice of wholemeal toast, make phone calls.

  Twelve

  It was four that afternoon before Jeni drove up to the peace camp; Nancy alongside her, Gareth penned in the back seat.

  A series of POLICE: NO STOPPING signs lined both sides of the verge but there was still room to squeeze Meg the Mini into the mouth of the green lane behind several other cars which she recognized as belonging to supporters.

  A white MOD Police Range Rover waited over the way, with a couple of watchful officers inside. Part of the churned field beyond was cordoned with white tape. A new half-moon of razor wire bulged a few yards behind the wrecked part of the fence. A mobile multiple floodlight, like a vaulting horse on little wheels … a vacant jeep … two men in suits consulting in a wood-panelled estate car. Half a dozen Americans in battledress slouched at ease, armed with M-16s, a couple smoking cigarettes. One soldier was a sharp-faced woman with bright red hair spilling from her cap; she looked like trouble. The only soldier wearing a steel helmet was oriental, stocky and expressionless.

  “That one could be Korean,” Jeni told Nancy. “Korean-American. Did you know that’s the only foreign language they hold religious services in on the base? Korean. Must be enough of them to have their own chaplain. Maybe some of them are barbecue chefs.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “No. Fancy being shot by a Korean in the heart of Merrie England? Kim the Killer.”

  Nancy glared through her glasses. She ran a hand through her yellow curls. To Jeni’s eyes Nancy Abbott could well be Gareth’s brother, a negative photo of him even to the fleshy fat lips. No doubt that was why the two had gravitated together. In loving each other Nancy and Gareth loved themselves, anima and animus without any chance of animosity. No wonder they didn’t feel the need to get married formally. Or to have kids; they’d already reproduced, become twofold. Jeni occasionally felt jealous of her friends’ mutual identity, yet mostly she felt safe with it, consoled and sheltered. Above all, they didn’t dominate her. So what if she’d moved her home and job at their prompting? Something else had urged her to make the move. So what if she paid them a fair rent, with which to buy themselves Old Roses? So what if she became minutes secretary? Village activities and socialism notwithstanding, Nancy and Gareth were ultimately self-involved. They would never try to invade her head the way Donna or the Trots had done. She was simply their comrade who lived next door.

  “It’s cooled. No panic.” Mal sounded offended to see Jeni.

  “How about Gisela?”

  He shrugged. Actually he looked a bit catatonic, maybe due to lack of sleep.

  If only there was a “safe house” in Kerthrop where a camper could wallow in a bath, catch a film on TV, spend the night when feeling sickly. Yanks rented or owned fifty per cent of the village, yet surely there must be a dissenting British household who’d be willing to help out. Mal had overruled this idea. A camper must camp, not swan off to the lap of luxury whenever the weather turned foul. For then the camp would fail. They would blow it.

  “We needn’t have come,” observed Gareth.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “There’s nothing going on, is there, Jen girl?”

  “Except for twelve thousand Yanks getting ready for Armageddon.”

  “That’s counting wives and kids. Mind, I agree.” He stared broodily through the wire at the runway’s huge expanse of concrete partly masked by those concrete whales; he pulled out his pipe.

  Jack pointed. “Don’t knaa if ye can make it oot, but yon’s a Rapier missile contraption.”

  “Won’t it be wonderful,” asked Nancy, “when all this is restored to farmland again?”

  Gareth sucked on his pipe. “Don’t know whether we’ll see that. Can’t do without a conventional defence policy on the Swiss or Swedish model, can we? We’ll probably use the base as a base.”

  “Oh don’t fudge before we’ve even won!” exclaimed Jeni.

  “I’m not, I’m being realistic. What, more farmland? With all the grain mountains and milk lakes?”

  “Aid. For the Third World, Gareth.”

  “We overproduce as it is, without adding hundreds of extra acres. Do you realize, this base could make a perfect low security prison? Relieve overcrowding no end, it would. Fine recreational facilities.”

  “Is that what ye think, ye daft bugger?” Jack butted in. “Wey, if army camps is wanted as spare prisons they’d used some shithouse in the north. That’s where yor workin’ class yobs without jobs is, what gans roond commitin’ outrages.”

  “A proper revolutionary government would dynamite this place
,” Jeni said hotly, “because it’s a symbol of power against people. Sod its bowling alleys and burger bars.”

  “It could be a leisure park,” suggested Gareth. “A liberated US base, hosting freedom holidays for Czechs and Poles.” Was he joking?

  “Have you any news of Gisela?” Jeni asked Jack.

  “Bit soon for that, pet.” Jack didn’t look as distressed as he should if he and Gisela had been flattening grass together. Maybe her suspicions were ill-founded.

  Mal had sunk into a bent, torn deckchair and was gazing vacantly into space.

  The supporters from Churtington had all driven away by six. A civilian police van had collected the NO STOPPING signs. All the perimeter spotlights had come on, providing free street lighting for the peace camp. USAF guards on the far side of the wire were down to three, plus Jeep.

  Mitzi strummed a guitar, singing softly to herself. Jack had taken his dog for its evening walk up Hobby Hill. Nell was playing portable Scrabble with Andy. A calm mackerel sky; there might be frost later that night, or a fog.

  Gareth paced restively, pipe long extinguished.

  “We going soon, Jen? Nance and I have things to do.”

  “I’ve decided to stay overnight.” Jeni suddenly didn’t wish to go home just yet. The toilet-creature … that hallucination. She needed company. “You drive Meg back, will you? Pick me up some time tomorrow morning.”

  “Surely.” Gareth promptly stuck his hand out for the keys.

  “I’ll get my sleeping bag.” Jeni always kept it in the car. A bad snowstorm could quickly block country roads; and a Mini had tiny wheels. Twice that winter she had stayed over in Churtington after school rather than risk the ten miles.

  “Jeni!” called Nell. “Are you insured for a second driver? The MOD tailed me last week, then a few miles further on the civilian fuzz flagged me down. Said they’d had a report of an unroadworthy vehicle. I think it pissed them off as much as me, since the beetle’s quite okay. I finally got them to admit it was the MOD.”

  “Did you get the full works?” asked Jeni, while Gareth fidgeted. “Pennies in the tyre treads?”

  “Absolutely. They weren’t too happy with the shocks, but they let that go. Pissed off, they were.”

  “I’m fully insured.”

  Nell winked. “To live outside the law, you must be honest, eh?”

  *

  Supper was vegetable stew cooked over the open fire, and slabs of wholemeal bread. Wispy mist began seeping from the ploughed land over the road, from the lawn of the dog pound, from those parts of the airfield which were still field. If anything, the wall of floodlighting surrounding the base seemed all the brighter. The residential side was a city of lights. Had Jeni been back home in Melfort she could have seen a dome of radiance that smudged the stars away.

  Towards nine, pairs of F-111s roared skyward in unison, each with twin exhausts aflame. In all a dozen jets took off. Their meteor-fires disappeared into the east.

  “Maybe they’re shifting them,” hazarded Mal. “Perhaps to Turkey.”

  Mist thickened. A guard dog howled, though dogs usually patrolled quietly. Bess whimpered softly. Jeni shivered one instant then found herself unaccountably sweating. The night air was playing tricks; there was a fever in it.

  “At least if they pull the plug,” said Nell, “we’re in the right place to die fast.”

  “They’re trying to pull it, aren’t they?” murmured Mitzi. “Come in, human race; your time is up.”

  “Damn them!” swore Jeni. “Damn them to hell.”

  Hooves drummed down Hobby Hill.

  For a moment everything was frozen.

  Then the first horse burst into view, side-lit by blurred arc lights, its rider ducking over.

  Thoughts flickered through Jeni’s head. The hunt was coming for revenge. Rednecks had formed a company of the Ku Klux Klan. As yesterday, the campers scattered – Jeni ducking under a hawthorn which tore at her hair.

  A second horse … now a third. This was a total echo of the day before.

  Except, as the first beast leapt the campfire, the smell of it hit her. Except, the rider’s clothes were all rags and in his haggard face the eyes squirmed like egg-white loose in a pan of boiling water.

  Thirteen

  The next rider who thundered past on a putrefying nag wasn’t even properly human. Never could have been. Sprouting from his or her shoulders was a hound’s head, which gave cry.

  The third horse was flayed raw. A dog, stretched into human shape, rode it.

  The fourth and last hunter was an X-ray animal. Hardly any flesh still hung on it. Its internal organs were visible as bouncing bags and tubes of jelly in a cage of bones and ropy muscle. In the valley of its neck vertebrae pulsed a leathery football which seemed to be its rider. A free-loading tumour, a giant toad. The creature passed by.

  Andy was shrieking in a high-pitched way, till Nell ran and slapped his cheek, then hugged him. Mal was jerking his plaster-cast finger after the nightmares; his jaws worked but no words came.

  “Yerbuggerinhell!” With this cry, Jack took off for the road in pursuit. Jeni rushed after him on quaking legs which threatened to dump her in a heap.

  Already the beasts had reached the scene of yesterday’s explosion. They galloped full-circle in the foggy glare of lights – American voices were shouting – then the dog-ridden horse charged at what was left of the original fence.

  As soon as it touched wire, the beast popped like a bubble. Where it had been an instant before, darkness swelled. A short black tunnel repelled all light.

  The X-ray horse charged next. It vanished into the blackness … and emerged beyond, to hurl itself headlong at the inner ring of razor-wire.

  Flashes. Crack-rack-rack-rack – at least one of the guards had opened fire. Bare bones and dripping entrail bags hit the steel bales, and vanished. The black tunnel leapt out almost to the spotlights.

  Rack-rack-rack.

  The rotten nag pounded into the tunnel, pursued by the fourth beast.

  Rack-rack-

  The spotlights went out. Night gulped that area, though it didn’t muffle the screaming.

  …On the TV set in Old Roses Jeni had seen infra-red videos on the News filmed from an F-111 as it targeted its laser-guided bombs. Grainy shadow-images of apartment blocks, cars parked on avenues, barracks, compounds.

  As she stared into the guzzling darkness she now saw her own personal infra-red video. Not of a Jeep and those USAF guards, not of the horses from Hades. She was seeing a muddy, rutted earth road, thatched cottages with vegetable gardens.

  Few of the cotts were built of stone. Most had clay walls speckled with chopped straw. Pokey windows were either sackcloth, which had been ripped, or lattice smashed through as if by fists. No: one cott’s windows seemed to be of polished, cracked horn. Doors were only hard burlap curtains, torn aside. So many trees loomed behind!

  A child’s naked matchstick corpse lay in the road, near a dead hound. Crows were hopping close.

  Beyond the cotts she saw a stone-built manor with outhouses of wood and clay. A man’s crumpled body, wearing tunic and hose, lay in the manor gateway; and more than the manor’s chimney was smoking. Grey tendrils seeped from the whole tiled roof, soon to flare ablaze.

  Oozy blackness hung over the village. Not night or low storm cloud or smoke pall … a sort of aerial rot or inky fungus.

  Opposite the doomed Manor was the timber lych-gate of a Norman-style church. From the church itself strode a monk in dingy brown robes, whose head was concealed by a cowl. The monk held out before him a heavy brass cross, pointed at the ground like a divining rod. Or like a sword. The tip glittered and flickered. Behind the monk capered a line of nude men and women, boys and girls, sniggering, leering, and goosing. Hands thrust to clutch the bum in front, hands groped behind to clutch whichever genitals.

  As the monk led his followers through the lych-gate on to the road the mud squirmed as if thousands of worms were writhing in the dirt. Now the
naked people were grimacing as much as grinning, groaning as much as sniggering. It occurred to Jeni that they couldn’t let go of each other. They were glued together sexually.

  A woman clad in russet gown and white wimple ran from the Manor, screaming soundlessly at the procession. The monk jerked his cross at her. No sooner, and she was spinning round, burning like a pitchy torch. Her screams now were of agony, and of a despair greater than agony. When she collapsed, the mud bubbled about her greedily.

  A soldier rode into view, half-armoured in breastplate and pointed helmet with chainmail tails. In his mailed fist, a broadsword. He’d arrived too late to save the lady, if that had been his intention. To Jeni’s eyes his mount was a giant, prancing carthorse. The warrior – maybe he was a knight – spurred at the monk, swinging his sword. The glittering cross rose to meet the blow … and the broadsword incandesced like phosphorus dipped in water. The attacker’s studded gauntlet glowed red hot. He howled unheard anguish. His steed bolted clumsily. Tearing at that terrible, flesh-cooking glove with his other hand, the man unbalanced. He crashed to the ground. His weapon had already fallen; quenched by the mud, the metal had warped into a sickle shape. The man lay still. The fall must have snapped his spine.

  The monk gestured to his flock. They fell upon all fours, to root at the mud like snorting swine; and then to abominate each other, mounting, squealing.

  Jeni shook, appalled. Was this something which had actually happened once, at the original Melfort? Here, hereabouts. Desecration, evil indignity, death. Which she was suddenly seeing re-enacted in some mirror of the past?

  Or was this an insane degraded parody of the present? Of the earthy peace camp and the military … and who could that monk be but her own twisted subconscious version of the vicar?

  The manor house was well ablaze, cascading sparks. The polluted church was shaking as if an earthquake shrugged its shoulders beneath it. Cracks forked the walls. Coping stones fell.

  And then the monk marched purposefully in Jeni’s direction. For the first time she could see the head inside the hood.