The Power

by Ian Watson

  Twenty-four

  “Wey, Aa freewheels doonhill a way, then Aa peddles a bit. Nowt te be seen but the road an’ hedges an’ a few deed cows standin’ lookin’ tatty an’ stupid. Their teats was drippin’ a bit. But it worn’t milk, Bert. More like thin yellow pus. Their udders didn’t look as if they’d split, more like shrivelled up, ye knaa. Wasted away.”

  Bert nodded. “It’s the same on my farm. George’s farm. They look as if they’re grazing, but they aren’t really. Just going through the motions. Like George himself, and my Pauline.”

  “Mebbe that’s as weel, what wiv no sun and no rain!” Jack eyed the grey overcast and tinkled his bell a couple of times as if this might summon a shower or sunshine.

  They…that’s Jack, perched on the bike he’d borrowed from the Blakelocks whose boy used to deliver the papers, and Bert and Nell and Jeni, and Bess who’d accompanied Jack on his expedition into the unknown…were outside the shop and sub post-office in the High Street, from which he’d set out, and to which he’d returned.

  Through the plate glass frontage proprietress Mrs Yates was visible standing numb as a huge anaesthetized maggot in soggy floral print dress behind her postal counter, face blotched with mould. While she waited perplexed to sell stamps for letters to no possible destination or to cash post mortem pensions, the inventory team had passed busily through her store, hauling out all sour milk and defrosted ice cream and hamburgers and lollies to dump in the tiny apple orchard behind her house. Since nominally this was just the start of April there were no house flies, bluebottles, or clegs to cluster on the festering faces of the dead, to tramp their excremental feet on spongy tissue and paddle in pulpy skin. So where did maggots come from? Presumably they came with the package of death, part of the time-shunt. You could bet there would be a feast of flies soon enough; and they wouldn’t be disabled.

  As to other winged creatures – excluding the aimless chickens and dotty ducks – rather less than the usual number of wild birds were about. None seemed capable of flying with any assurance of success. A couple of pecking pigeons were staggering in the street, and some sparrows were hopping and falling and hopping like cripples on matchstick crutches. The birds were half blind.

  “After a bit it gets real foggy, clarty as a coalhoose. Soon Aa starts gannin’ uphill again. Presently Aa finds mesel comin’ back into the village from the other direction. It’s as Aa expected.”

  “I do hope you haven’t made yourself sick,” Nell said, “if you exposed yourself to any radiation.”

  “Aa don’t think so. Ye canna gan far enough to run into the aftermath. About a mile, Aa’d say. Couple o’ miles radius: that’s wor lot.”

  Bess trundled towards the pigeons. Smelling them, she whined and backed off. Bad birds.

  “Melfort’s under an emergency power, ye might say. Aa’m thinkin’ though, that we haven’t met any more monsters like we did that neet. An’ it hasn’t pulled any more really dorty tricks like killin’ Sheri’s lad.”

  “Does it need to?” Jeni asked bitterly. “Do we have to meet monsters, when Mrs Yates is standing in there dead and alive? Huh! Too many shocks, and it might drive us totally mad. We wouldn’t be in any fit state to be able to suffer. But don’t let’s count our chickens. Just wait for the next turn of the screw. It has plenty of time in hand, if the food’ll last out for a couple of years. I’ve always heard that waiting is an essential part of torture. Recovering just sufficiently, then being dragged screaming again, to the pain. Maybe we’re all co-operating nicely by staging capers like the tournament tonight. Setting ourselves up.”

  “Divven’t say that, Jen. We’re responsible for folks’ welfare.”

  “Responsible. Just as we were responsible for world peace.”

  “In wor own little way.”

  “Maybe this is a Hades for the helpful. If you’re always trying to help people whether they want it or not, maybe you have to go on helping them – even when they’re bloody dead! Why us?” Jeni had started quietly, as though dead Mrs Yates might overhear and call out the answer mockingly. But her voice rose to a howl. “Why? Why? Why?”

  “Keep yor hair on, pet. Mebbe there’s places like this aal over the globe. Sanctuaries.”

  “Do you really think so? Our world’s done in. Just this tiny part of it’s been kept ticking over to amuse something that’s vile and evil. The vic – ”

  “What’s that?” Bert asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  Such an outcry could only attract some attention. Three wretched corpse-toddlers came hobbling from a gateway, two scrawny girls with open foul wounds, not red but greenly gangrenous, and one bloated ulcerated boy. They approached.

  “Wey, mebbe the simple bairns knaa more aboot it then worsels?” Jack dismounted, dropping the cycle. He crouched, holding out his arms as the kids came closer; and Jeni was so glad of this distraction.

  The girls hung back but the boy wobbled onward to halt before Jack.

  “Wey, there’s me bonny lad. Will ye tell me, son? What dee ye think’s happened te yor village? An’ yor sisters an’ Mam and Dad? An’ you?”

  The swollen boy opened his puffy mouth, and vomited a brown mass of what looked like soaked cat biscuits. Jack knifed hastily out of the way as the mess hit the tarmac.

  “Aa think,” he said unsteadily, “this lad’s a bit of a fatty. He’s been stuffin’ hisself oot o’ habit.” Jack leaned over. “That’s nay good for yor constitution, son. Not when yor in this state.”

  The pub that evening was straight out of Goya. Or maybe the bar was the Raft of the Medusa? “Far worse!” thought Jeni, fighting an initial urge to spew, to run screaming. Paraffin lamps let her see too much.

  How could they possibly have organized this? They must already be mad without realizing. This was like holding a ball in Belsen, a gala at Nagasaki, a fête in fire-bombed Dresden; in miniature. It wasn’t even a modern horror any longer; it was medieval. A totentanz…almost as had happened once in the muddy street of the old village…worse, really.

  The White Lion was packed with shuffling, decaying corpses, young and old. Maggots squirmed in waxy craters. Green flesh hung loose from hands like shucked-off mittens still attached by a cord to the wrist. Noses and cheeks unravelled like fraying balaclavas. Faces were lumps of blue-vein or Gorgonzola or Dolcelatte cheese a week past their prime. Eyes were soft-boiled eggs. Tongues and lips were offal.

  Eppur si muove.

  Clothes – trousers, frocks, and blouses – were blemished by the deliquescence of the flesh and slow leakage from within: of bile, rheum, liquid chocolate leaking from the bowels, yellow bladder drippage, mushroom juice seeping from lungs….

  Why should she be thinking of these abominations in terms of the contents of restaurant dustbins? Was it to make the ghastly dead a fraction more palatable? Though not appetizing. Let’s pretend the slowly putrefying tissue’s something else, soft sculptures assembled by a lunatic, a merde artist working in filth. It was said you could get used to most things; and as the minutes went by, and no one actually oppressed her, she felt more capable. At least there wasn’t any dramatic vomiting or diarrhoea. The dead had their token quarter-pints of this and that, but the occasional sip was ample to wet the whistle, to top up the drips of fluid that leaked out. Their metabolisms were all drastically slowed down, as retarded as their minds.

  There, for instance, sat Pauline Morris, the stains on her ballooning frock almost lost amongst a loud flower pattern. Bare arms and swollen ankles suppurated, and her broad face looked coated in damp dough. She’d lost her left ear and most of her hair. She wheezed as she sat there, a slow creaky bellows, perhaps humming to herself. Occasionally she raised her lemonade to her puffy lips and sweet slaver dribbled down her chin.

  The committee had organized teams to toss, as best they could, the yellow wooden “cheeses” at the skittles table. With its iron-hooped net, this resembled a football goal.

  Bert, who was a grand master of the arcane if elementary
rules, was stationed by the scoreboard with a stick of chalk. Sheri was in charge of the elimination chart. Jack hovered near the net to set tumbled skittles upright again, and to wipe the greasy cheeses with a towel when they became too slippery for rotting fingers to grip effectively.

  Of course some cheeses flew askew, while others didn’t even reach the table. It was amazing that any of the shambolic players did hit their targets. Yet this happened as often as not. Skittles fell; scores accumulated. As the night wore on the “Duffers” knocked out the “Fluff Balls”. (Bert had told Sheri the usual team titles.) The ladies of “WI-1” trounced the “Munch Bunch”. The “Likely Lads” fell to the “Invalids”.

  Corpses who weren’t playing crowded the rest of the room, either eyeing the bout in progress with a browsing, cattle-like gaze, mooing approval or condolence, or else conversing after a fashion, making mumbling, bubbling sounds. Nell presided behind the bar alongside Tom Tate, who belched out incoherent comments that went unheeded; he seemed worked up with excitement at the half-remembered phenomenon of busy trade. Mitzi often cheered encouragingly, as did Jack and Sheri. Bess scoffed up spilled, unwanted crisps.

  Jack took care not to return the stack of cheeses too vigorously to the next player in case he knocked off loose flesh or even whole fingers. Stout Mrs Boxall had already lost a thumb, which stuck to the cheese when she threw it.

  “Gi’s a hand settin’ ’em up, Jen!”

  Yes, she could do that. Corpses didn’t touch the actual skittles.

  And so the night wore on till the final presentation – by Sheri, to the morosely triumphant “Duffers” – of the Whatsit Trophy. Which was a wooden spanner, painted silver, nailed to a chunk of oak. By that time Jeni had downed several whiskies and felt almost casual amidst the crush of walking corpses – until one gripped her by the wrist.

  “Gareth! But…let go of me!”

  He hadn’t been here earlier. He and Nancy had remained at Old Roses, along with Andy. Jeni had seen to that, arguing that you couldn’t fit the whole village in the pub, that Gareth was no skittles ace, that the evening might upset him because he’d nursed ambitions and here he’d be ordered around by a committee of which he wasn’t and couldn’t be a member. He might feel humiliated and aggrieved.

  Excuses, excuses; though the others had swallowed them. At Felix’s funeral Gareth had tried to lead a pressure group against her – to oppress her, dominate her. She was sure of it.

  Now here he was, holding on to her, fixing her with rheumy eyes set in a face that was all one single drippy acne-splotch. It must have taken most of the evening for his dimmed intelligence to suss out her whereabouts – like someone picking at a scab till it comes loose – but finally he had.

  “What do you want? Get off, will you! Please?”

  Maybe Gareth was feeling betrayed and wretched. His tenant and client, Jeni, had suddenly evolved to a higher state of intelligence leaving him stuck behind in the condition of an ape. He had devolved; it came to the same thing.

  “Awoo-glaaaa,” he said. Like a slowed-down tape recording.

  She owed him something, didn’t she? Just as she owed all of them something.

  “Head and bed,” he said, leering closer. “Lock and cock. Cage and dong. Ring-a-ding-dong. Wedding bells ring.” He sang, soft and slobbery, “Bell of – Saint Mary – let’s feel you a-balling!” An enflamed eyelid drooped as if in a wink. “Belle of the ball, Jeneeee.”

  “Help me,” she whispered as random words oozed out of him – but were they quite so random? An obscene theme seemed to link them.

  “Necrophily’s the scene, Jeneeee. If Shereeee’s from Philadelphia – ”

  “She isn’t. I’m sure she isn’t.”

  “Then I’m from Necrophilia. Nice new name for Malfort, boyos! Increase and multiply, ye dead! We’ll keep a welcome – ”

  He’d gone insane. As well as being dead he was insane.

  “Listen Gareth, there’s been a nuclear war – ”

  “War, score. Let’s try to score. Score a try. Put the balls in touch. Try for a conversion. My tackle’s in good order. Must get to the church first, girl! Ding-dong-ball, pussy’s in the wall. Vicar’ll marry us, quite contrarious, how does my hardening grow? With silver balls and cockle hells and pussy maids all aglow.” Memories of the game of rugby; obscenely twisted songs and nursery rhymes. All converging on a theme which she didn’t wish to, which she dared not know about. Fortunately no one else would be able to understand him.

  “You’ve been awfully injured, Gareth, but you’re being kept alive by some perverse – ”

  “Reverse! First stage is a cage. Second rung is a tongue. Dung dung dung. Toilet-creature.”

  “What? How do you know about –? Jack!” she shrieked, as the dead skittle teams began heading homeward, surging, bearing her along in their flow towards the pub door, adding their pressure to Gareth’s tuggings.

  Jack breasted the tide of shuffling corpses and dragged her clear. Gareth’s hand slid off her like a cold eel, a boneless thing. Like the appendage that had killed Felix. In her dream, that was, only in her dream! Gareth was leaving along with the dead, a passive automaton once again.

  “Wey, what’s wrong?”

  She breathed deeply, despite the stench in the White Lion.

  “Gareth seized hold of me. He was acting weirdly.”

  “That’s to be expected, pet.”

  “Threateningly. Sexually.”

  “Aa see.”

  “Maybe the Power’s planning something.”

  “Ye’ll be safe wiv me, Jen. Divven’t take on.”

  Later, back in the granny flat, she felt light-headed from the whiskies, and Jack kept bumping into things, particularly herself. Particularly. Holding on to her, touching her.

  Yet somehow she couldn’t accept going upstairs with him, to sleep with him. Even if all that they did was sleep, and keep yor feet still, Geordie hinny. Which – she doubted – wouldn’t have been all that they did if they went upstairs together.

  “Gareth,” she thought, “has laid his mark on me. His prohibition. For tonight, at any rate.”

  Twenty-five

  Some twenty juniors of assorted size sat limply on dwarf chairs in the school hall, which doubled as a gym as well as a classroom for first years and rising fives. Wall bars, ladder, and climbing ropes were mounted along one side. The opposite wall was mostly windows, with jagged cracks in two, giving on to the concrete schoolyard fringed with its railing of iron spears.

  Posters of farming through the ages papered the other walls, along with kiddy artwork of the village duckpond, golden Guernseys in an emerald field, a dingy medieval ploughman, a combine harvester crayoned like a futuristic, bloodstained battle-tank. Behind the school piano hung a giant, dog-eared, calendar-like pad the size of a Sunday newspaper with verses of hymns printed large upon it. Cases and tables displayed cardboard farms with paper animals, model tractors, and old photographs of pre-First World War harvesting time. The whole school had been busy on a farm project, up until the war, the final war.

  A few dead John Clare first years had been dragooned into class too. Twelve year olds; these were just a spit away from the oldest of the juniors, though to them that might once have seemed a giant spit.

  Mitzi was presiding, with Miss Samuels slumped mori-bundly at her desk up front looking and smelling like a dead rock salmon. Since Mitzi knew nothing agricultural and the head teacher was no longer a fount of any sort of wisdom, Mitzi had invited Bert in to talk to the class of corpses.

  Maybe something would penetrate – something familiar – to stir their expired, robotic minds. Continuity!

  Bert wasn’t exactly an organized talker working to any plan, and his audience had brain-rot besides tics and palsies. The glassy-eyed, festering kids seemed half comatose, half deranged. But once he got launched, Bert spoke with a muted passion which suggested that he was mainly talking to himself, rehearsing something which was preying on his own mind. He’d never been q
uite so garrulous as chairman of the committee. Perhaps now he had the ideal audience to bounce his thoughts off, an audience of dummies; and after a while Mitzi cottoned on.

  “…In my own Dad’s or Grandad’s day all you children would have had to do farm work, you see? In May or June you’d have been hand-weeding the corn and scaring off birds, and later on you’d be gleaning and threshing grass against hurdles to get the seed for replanting. In the old days we didn’t have tractors and combines or weedkillers and fertilizers, right? To make hay you used scythes and handrakes and pitchforks. You started off as a raker, then a pitcher of sheaves, then you had to learn to load on to a wagon, swan-back so the stuff wouldn’t fall off, and only after years’ experience could you be trusted to build a rick….

  “Those old-fashioned stooks and ricks were a lot better at drying what you’d cut. With combining there’s a lot more moisture left in the grain. That’s why you see grain-driers and storage bins on farms these days. The seed merchants won’t take the stuff straight off….

  “Talking of hay, grass is the crop that Britain grows best. I mean naturally best, without using chemicals and stuff. You know all that ridgy land down along the valley? Them fields like corrugated roofs?”

  Mitzi wondered what valley; then decided he must be meaning the area in between Melfort and Hobby Hill.

  “Anyone know how them ridges came about?”

  No one knew anything.

  “Well, those were water meadows made by ridging the land and diverting the Thrush, using dams and wooden hatches. You flooded your grassland in the winter. That was mainly to protect the grass against hard winter frosts that would knock it back. Come March, you’d close your hatches to let the meadows drain, the grass would shoot up, and you could put your animals out to pasture a good month earlier than otherwise….