The Power

by Ian Watson

  And no one but herself, and dead Felix, had ever seen the arm. How much credence had the others placed in her “outburst”? Jack hadn’t pursued the theme; nor Sheri. Nor had Jack asked what she and Gareth got up to together. He must have been waiting for her to tell him of her own free will. Within a few days of the event Jeni had stopped feeling quite so annihilated; by then she hadn’t wanted to tell him. And so time passed by.

  If any of the dead had come across the toilet-thing, they weren’t saying. They made no better sense than the residents of a senile dementia ward. Gareth likewise; clarity had abandoned him.

  How lonely Jeni felt; yet couldn’t share her loneliness. She was aware that loneliness might be another trap, leading her to confide and betray. Particularly she rejected the snuffly, dumb overtures of Bess. And this was perhaps the true content of the blankness she had begged for: an untrusting void in the heart. How it ached, this hollow wound that Gareth had been driven to inflict in her. Whenever Jeni was about, Nell also acted pretty blank these days; Jeni couldn’t help noticing that. Thus blankness mutiplied itself as in an empty mirror.

  Of course, there were all the projects of the committee to keep one busy. The Old Folk Patrol. Animal welfare; keeping an eye on the deadstock. The afternoon youth club in the village hall, which was as bashful and tongue-tied as ever it had been in the past, with the added ingredients of decay and morbidity; at least, while the batteries lasted, the dead kids could hear cassettes of their onetime favourites, a-ha!, Amazulu, Whitney Houston, Madonna. Some zombie “lessons” in the school. Blundering, sluggish games. A playgroup of cancerous mothers and stunned corpse-toddlers. A random number of the dead would usually turn up for such events; spontaneously wasn’t exactly the word. Other torpid participants could be rousted out.

  And there was Church.

  For the living were obliged to attend a morning “service” every day without fail. If not, then evil might opt to speak with a different voice than the vicar’s, with a voice of vile incidents. The dead came too, without any prompting from the living. First a handful, soon a score, presently many more.

  Sometimes the vicar’s head simply harangued his congregation in the style of a hell-fire preacher, as if St Mary’s had regressed into an earlier age. Partridge raved in the accents of Revelation. Open the bottomless pit! A flying eagle full of eyes. A red dragon casting down suns. Fire from heaven, smoke of torment. In one hour made desolate. Gnaw your tongues for pain. Plague, poison.

  He was merely describing what had happened everywhere else on Earth, either immediately or lingeringly. But not in Melfort – where ye shall seek death and shall not find it! The vicar lashed them with his black tongue furiously, for the lunatic folly of the nuclear war. During such rants the Power’s attention often seemed elsewhere, as though the head was running on autopilot while the Power concentrated…upon what? Maintaining the time-twisted envelope around the village. Adjusting, balancing, tuning…whatever. Keeping the house of cards from tumbling, keeping the corpses feebly kicking.

  On other occasions the vicar insisted upon a Quaker-like silence. These times were almost more daunting, which was perhaps the intention. Was the Power about to fail, unless they added their will to his? Were the black freezing nuclear winter and the hot radiation about to flood in over the village? Unless they all concentrated, unless they all prayed….

  Other times, he demanded praise like some petulant child who had performed an exemplary antic.

  “…And the deadly wound was healed. And they worshipped the power of the beast! Amen! That’s what the pernicious book of rubbish prophesies – the book that led the world to disaster. What an embittered, vengeful, paranoid fellow old John of Patmos was, to be sure. Classic nut case, eh congregation? All please shout, ‘Oh yes he is!’”

  And the dead groaned out, “Oh – yez – ee – iz.”

  “Sexual frustrate, to boot. I gave Jezebel space to repent her fornications; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed. John wants to screw her, right? And he lusts after riches. Pearls and pure gold as clear as glass and all manner of precious stones which he never owned. Emeralds and topazes, the compleat potentate’s treasure chest, eh? So how about some worship? Let’s hear it for the power of the beast! Praise me, praise me, praise me!”

  And the dead praised the Power raggedly, automatically, till the vicar’s head chortled with satisfaction.

  The living coped with these praise sessions variously, since the Power didn’t seem to object to parody. The more of a mockery, the better, as they discovered. The sooner it was all over.

  Mitzi and Nell ululated – woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo – like the Greenham wimmin. Sheri adopted a cheer-leader approach, bouncing up and down, waving her arms, twirling an imaginary baton, bawling for her grid-iron gladiator in his helmet of rusty bars. Jack would bellow out, “Wey, you’re a canny bugger!” Then he’d launch into the gloom-song about the Aberfan pit-heap disaster, made all the more lugubrious by his Geordie rendition. Putting in whatever words took his fancy and as many extra vowels as he could manage, he wrung out his heart like a dirty wash leather.

  “Wey, close the cyoal-hoose door, lads,

  “It’s treacherous insyide,

  “There’s dort an’ cancer an’ starvyation –”

  Bert took up this lead. In a joke rustic voice – or maybe this was Bert’s notion of a black and white minstrel, since he rolled his eyes – he murdered various hymns.

  “Oh Power aar ‘elp in ages parst,

  “Aar ‘ope fur years to coom – ”

  Jeni adapted the labour anthem, which wasn’t really too wide of the mark with all its martyred dead:

  “The Power’s flag is deepest black,

  “It flies upon a heap of cack –”

  Welcome to the monkey house. Or the raucous tropical aviary. The further over the top they went, the more tolerable these lunatic rites of worship.

  But that particular morning the mood in church was different to other days….

  More of the dead were present than ever, even some corpses who were totally lethargic at any other time, never stirring unless frog-marched. They all seemed…expectant? Like dogs hoping for a bone from the butcher’s van.

  The vicar’s head made a speech.

  “Dearly beloveds! What if the nuclear evil is so much greater than ordinary evil that, set against the nuclear darkness, evil is light? Not a bright light. But light enough. The only illumination left.

  “Evil rules, now. Evil is all that protects you. All that cherishes. Because it has the sense to want to survive. Because that’s all there is left now. Oh, evil has always loved people – with the lust of a spider that feasts on its mate! Or like some other creepy-crawly joke of nature that eats up its paralysed parent! You’re the parent of evil. You’re its creator and its lover, its victim and its slave. It is your very own monster, your mistress, your master, your clever torturer. It is the friend of the filth in your heart which now covers the world so thickly that everything stifled and died. And evil itself would die thus. How could evil not cherish you, so as to protect its own existence?

  “Well, my kiddies…my mums and dads…ye must become as children, eh? Boys and girls shall come out to play. May Day will be your holiday of horror. Just harken to the celebration I have planned. There’ll be presents for almost everyone, and a big big surprise!”

  Thirty-two

  However, Partridge’s head had not enlarged on the precise nature of the surprise. Else how would it be a surprise? He had merely instructed them to prepare a traditional May Day celebration. A procession round the streets. Music and maypole dances on the green. Those ancient rituals: of the merry freshening of spring into summer, of fertility, of the leaping of beasts and the singing of birds and springing of leaves from all the darling swelling depraved sticky buds.

  This knowledge was certainly in the vicar’s skull even if he had always abominated the practice. If any residue of Partridge’s intelligence remained in that
rotten head, how he must be howling inside.

  After the service the mouldering dead trudged out of the church and away. Did they have a slightly nimbler spring to their steps, especially the dead children? Hardly, hardly.

  The living had already escaped into the churchyard. So where was spring or summer? What could be seen of fields and trees and hedgerows through the grey pall presented the same unchanging silent sight, of nothing happening. A countryside in coma. That half-roasted and now half-rotten sheep watched them as numbly as if stuffed, though maggots seethed. Although weeks had gone by, it came as a surprise to be told that May Day was just around the corner; a surprise in several ways.

  “Do ye knaa what date it is?” Jack asked Bert.

  “I haven’t been paying much heed to calendars lately. Been neglecting my weedkiller diary.”

  “The Power must’ve been keepin’ track o’ what passes for time. Only, it occurs te me – “

  “I’d have thought it’s closer to mid May by now.”

  “Or even June,” said Mitzi.

  “Never!” Nell exclaimed. “It can’t be later than the end of April.”

  “Wey, what a bunch we are. It’s got us aal confused. We divven’t even knaa what month it is. We should’ha kept count.”

  “So who cares?” said Sheri. “If the Power wants it to be May Day next week, that’s May Day.”

  Jeni spoke. “I think we’ve been experiencing time differently.”

  “Wey, we’ve all been livin’ through the same days, pet.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Sheri, “day after day after lousy day.”

  “We don’t feel them the same way. They add up differently. Don’t you see what I mean? Nell feels as if it’s still April. Mitzi thinks it could be June.”

  “How aboot yourself?”

  Jeni shook her head. “I don’t know. But I want to cycle out of the village. No one’s been outside since you went, Jack, weeks ago. I want to feel for myself the way the road…bends back on itself – because there’s been a wrinkle in time. Maybe now it’s ironed out.” Now that the toilet-thing had completed its reverse life cycle, from Gareth’s ejaculation to Felix’s death.

  “I’ll come with you,” Sheri said suddenly and firmly.

  Did Sheri sense that Jeni’s proposed expedition wasn’t merely an exploration of twisted space and bent time but also a probing of something intensely personal to Sheri herself, something intensely hurtful – her son’s nasty murder?

  Did something in Jeni’s eyes short-circuit to Sheri in a flash of understanding, giving birth to a crazy hope that Felix’s death might somehow be undone? Undone, not by a Gareth stamping on the boy’s grave until the disembowelled little corpse heeded the call and rose writhing ghastly through the soil to clutch at its mother – but in some other magical way?

  Did Sheri fear that if she failed to go along she might miss out on something vitally important? The American stared at Jeni.

  “I will, too!”

  Jeni nodded, though she felt sick at heart.

  “Wey, that’s aal very fine an’ dandy, traipsin’ off for a picnic, but ye hoard the Power. We’ve to coach the bairns for May Day. We’ve rehearsals to arrange.”

  “I’ll only be gone an hour, if that. Then I’ll help,” promised Jeni. “I need to experience for myself what’s beyond the village.”

  “Yes, we have to,” Sheri said.

  “It’s all right, I want you to come.” That electric spark between them….

  “Aye, but how long’s an hour oot there these days?”

  They could as easily have walked. However, on a bicycle you felt that you could get away from things quicker, supposing you needed to get away from something.

  All of the village’s decent bikes were stored under cover at dead Fred Briggs’s garage. This had been Nell’s idea. Bikes were an unrepeatable resource, and a low technology one. One day she had collected all machines that were in good repair and had ridden them to the village garage, or in the case of kids’ bikes pushed them there.

  Not that there was any weather to rust the bikes. It neither rained, nor did it shine. Still, you never could tell.

  This initiative by Nell was her version of rural socialism, a pigeon which Jeni ought to have plucked by rights if other worries hadn’t been on her mind, or blankly absent from it. All means of transport which still worked should be centralized for the use of all. Not that anybody actually rode a bike nowadays. The dead lacked motive and coordination. And as for the living, Nell’s garaging project seemed to have effectively quarantined the bicycles, out of sight and out of mind.

  Out of mind, until Jeni and Sheri walked to Briggs’s garage to equip themselves: with a smart, small-wheeled, red Moulton for Sheri, and an old black single-speed job of thirty or forty years’ vintage for Jeni. Wicker basket strapped to the handlebars – the bike reminded Jeni of Oxford, all those male and female penguins pedalling to lectures with flapping gowns. Oxford, Donna, the Trots, the chestnut tree, that first experience of the Power….

  The streets and hard-standing continued to harbour immobilized cars and vans, and farm yards housed dead tractors – dozens of defunct vehicles with their batteries all going flat. Jeni was determined to check a bike out of the central depot to give her stamp of approval. She should have thought of this herself. At least she could demonstrate the concept in action. Why, Nell had almost stolen the scheme from her. “Mustn’t think ill of Nell. Mustn’t think ill.”

  Sheri and Jeni bowled downhill past forlorn cottages into a grey vaguery walled by hedges. A scraggy black and white bird standing at the edge of the tarmac cocked its head at the hiss of tyres and staggered drunkenly.

  “Hullo, Mister Magpie!” Jeni shouted at it, imitating the village kids. Unlucky not to greet magpies when you met them. One for sorrow, two for joy. There was only one magpie visible.

  Barks pursued them, and Jeni squeezed her brakes. Bess was lolloping in hot pursuit. The labrador skirted the confused bird. Even so, Mr Magpie fell over. Bess licked the leg of Jeni’s jeans.

  “Go back!” She pointed, flapped her hand. “Back!”

  “Woof,” remarked Bess.

  “Go away!” Jeni’s cry, almost of frustrated rage, drew an odd look from Sheri.

  “Go home, there’s a good mutt.”

  Bess ambled ahead, determined this time to ignore rebuffs. So they pedalled on, while the dog kept pace. A glance back showed Jeni the magpie struggling ineffectively to stand up again.

  The road twisted this way, that way. Then the surface began to break up. A pox of potholes soon joined together, so that what had been a perfectly decent road was reduced to a riverbed of loose stones, cratered and rutted.

  “Hey!” Sheri was having a rough ride on her Moulton’s small wheels; her bike kept trying to skid. So they stopped to consult, while Bess went sniffing about interestedly.

  Sheri massaged her bum. “Jack didn’t mention any of this mess, did he? Do you figure the blast-wave could have caused it? Blast wouldn’t tear up hardtop like this, would it? Looks like it’s been this way for years.”

  “I think we’ve got further than Jack did – and without being turned round.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s letting us go further.”

  “Into…radiation?”

  For answer Jeni gestured at the hedge, and the oak tree looming over it. The hedge was greening, the oak almost in leaf.

  “Not radiation.”

  Just then a thin russet blur rushed across the wreck of a road, a snake on legs, hardly more than an inch from the ground. Into view, out of view, diving into the grass verge. The dog hadn’t even noticed.

  “What was that?”

  “Weasel or stoat. I never know the difference. It was alive, Sheri! Really alive, full of beans. Extraordinary.”

  “You don’t suppose…maybe there wasn’t any war at all? That it’s all normal further out? But the Power wrapped the village up tight in some kinda forcefield where time stands sti
ll? And now we’re escaping back to the real world? Uh?”

  “Who are you kidding? After Damascus, and the Enterprise? After your base went ape, and shot Mal? After a sun exploded in the sky – just before the shutters got slammed!”

  “So where’s this, then? Why does it smell so fresh?”

  “Look at the state of this road. Then look up, Sheri, look up.”

  A black pall loomed overhead. The sky ahead wasn’t even the grey they’d become accustomed to, but an oppressive black.

  “Thunderclouds,” Sheri said feebly.

  “We’d better wheel the bikes.”

  Around the next bend, the road was only dry, gouged mud. Presently the hedgerows degenerated into a tangle of undergrowth backed by foggy forest which seemed to wear that eerie blackness like a drooping blanket draped over the crowns of all the trees. Behind branches, looming vaguely through the gloom, a squat tower.

  “I don’t like it, Jeni. These woods were never here before.”

  “Maybe they were. Once.”

  “What do you mean?”

  That tower – in the Norman style! Something foul was seeping from the woodland, turning the road surface to greasy, smelly mud. The bike tracks were like snakes. At the next bend the way broadened, and those old oaks drew right back from it, to reveal…

  …the church, riven by cracks, about to collapse. Its door yawned open. Burnt-out shell of the Manor and cremated outhouses; a few sly wisps of smoke still slunk up from there. Ravished cottages behind their strips of kitchen garden….

  Along the churned-up filthy road lay maybe a dozen corpses. One was badly charred. Another wore armour, which Jeni recognized. That pointy helmet, those chain-mail tails. Other bodies were naked, smeared with mud and with dried blood from the mutilations of their bums and sex organs. As though pigs had taken half-moon bites. Or people performing like pigs. The place seemed devoid of life, almost too devoid. Bess suddenly fled, back the way they had come.