The Power

by Ian Watson

  “Oh my God,” muttered Sheri. “Where is this?”

  “It’s the old medieval village of Melfort. Hundreds of years ago. The Power ravaged this place. I saw it happen. Just like this, in a sort of vision. I mean, this is how it would have looked afterwards. The day after, or a few hours after.”

  “Jeni, did you live here in some previous life?”

  The directness of the question horrified Jeni.

  “No, no, I couldn’t have done.” No, because she’d been a witch. Because inquisitors had tortured her and burned her. That must have happened in Europe. They hanged witches in England. Usually they hanged them after torturing them. She had no idea what language the witch and her persecutors had been speaking. When the witch cried out, her voice had seemed native, natural. No Power had come to her aid at the end. Whereas here…the Power arose and had its way with the villagers, and with the family in the manor house and the knight.

  Yet Jeni sensed the young witch lying in wait close by, waiting her opportunity. The witch inside her was only a little bitty way down the well-shaft, the inner pit. She was rising up, just as she’d risen to take control when Gareth demanded stimulation.

  “Let’s get out of here, quietly,” Jeni whispered.

  A cackle of laughter rang within the shattered church.

  “Jen-eeee!” cried a banshee voice.

  Her legs were paralysed, her feet were rooted. Beside her, Sheri was panting fast as if running, though she wasn’t actually going anywhere.

  Through the church doorway stepped the brown-robed monk.

  “Oh no.”

  The creature might once have been a man, or maybe it was only an imitation of a man, a twisted parody. Its hands…its claws…were stretching, flexing emptily. If only they had been encumbered with that brass cross, whatever its potency! But they weren’t, they were free.

  The monk’s cowl was thrown back, and the head – part gleaming bone, part ebony, part stiff jelly – was more horselike than ever as if some terrible living chess-piece rose curving from the creature’s shoulders. The nose and the huge-toothed mouth flowed into one another, jutting and predatory. The eyes were balls of blood. Its very look was paralysing. Yet one had to look at it, couldn’t look away.

  Was Sheri whimpering, or was it herself?

  The unhuman thing in monk’s robes walked down the graveyard path.

  “Stay and playyyy!” it whinnied. “Girl and girl come out to play, eh?”

  “Come on, come out,” Jeni begged the self inside herself. “Come out of me, witch. Take charge.”

  Now the monster had reached the lych gate, and was setting foot on the road. Foot or hoof or claw; the robe hid this detail.

  Within herself just below the surface surged someone who knew this beast, someone struggling to emerge as if from a cauldron of boiling water where she was trussed. And just before her other self burst free – it would be easier and easier each time, wouldn’t it? – Jeni realized the awful truth, too late. Of course, too late. To realize just a little too late is an exquisite part of torment.

  There was no weird young woman who had lived previously, and died previously. No elder, junior witch. There was only herself – sane, and insane. There was only sanity, and madness. Madness was her own mind turned inside out, tortured into another, alien shape.

  As the creature neared them, Jeni started to giggle and turned towards Sheri.

  Thirty-three

  To betray: that was the worst. To betray your friend, your family, or your pet animal, or your life or yourself. To betray meaning – the meaning that you’d accumulated within yourself, the meaning of your own person as bound up with the world of others, with living things, with life.

  Of course life always betrayed itself in the end – with death, the clawed shadow that waited to rip you and snuff you. This shadow followed everything that lived, and every living person cast this same shadow over others in the form of cruel words and cruel actions, of promises betrayed and hopes betrayed, of woundings and lost love, of the creation of grief as if grief was an art.

  This was the shadow that capered beside the pig on its panic truck-ride to the slaughterhouse. It was the gin trap that closed on the rabbit’s leg. It was the gunshot and the poison bait. It was the hook through the writhing worm that ripped the mouth of the trout. It was the napalm and the phosphorus. It was the machine-gunning of elephants from helicopters for their ivory. It was the bomb packed with ball bearings tossed into the playground or the supermarket. It was the electrodes on raped genitals. It was the beakless, clawless, bald chicken in its cage, the cage around the heart. It was the screaming vivisected monkeys, the nerve-gassed dogs, bleach-blinded bunnies, butchered whales, the human head in a cage for rats.

  Oh aren’t we sensitive today! In this world of deaths and living deaths! And is sensitivity, is guilt, enough of a penance? Especially when it’s best to ignore, to forget, to look the other way. Otherwise you might easily overload with horror – for pain runs implacably through an enormous subtle network. Otherwise you might go mad, with madness your only safety valve and final excuse, last exit from responsibility.

  Jeni wept. She wept. She let her body grieve, to drown her thoughts in tears. Grief consumed her.

  People had already betrayed the human race, including all the unborn. All possible significance had died. For a while the few survivors had continued to do things, pretending that a thread of meaning survived. They had counted cans of beans, garaged bikes, organized the parody lives of dead people and dead animals. Pretending.

  But no; no meaning.

  The Power would take them one by one. One by one it would splatter them, snap them like some vicious animate idol that liked to bite off a head now and then, enjoying the music of the screams, the hot rum of the blood. The Power was merely spinning out its narrowed range of choices.

  So it had revolted against the nuclear holocaust? Why should they believe a word that its mouthpiece, Partridge, said?

  Obviously they’d harboured a little hope. People are made that way. If the torturer says that you’ll be set free, or even granted a few days’ reprieve from pain to recover in your cell, you can’t help but hope, hopelessly. You can’t help but believe, however disbelievingly. And the Power knew this.

  Oh she wept. She wept for brave Sheri and for herself and for her other friends. She even wept for the goitered, ulcerated, blind goat on the green, and for that poor rotting sheep in the churchyard. And for the duck that swam in circles upside down, drowned but still driven onward.

  Words penetrated her own personal dense grey dripping fog. Faces loomed distorted. Jack’s. Mitzi’s.

  “Where’s Sheri, pet?”

  Jeni shook her head. Where was Jeni, for that matter? As the world became clearer she discovered the schoolyard. A maypole stuck up from a cross-base of timber like a candy-striped stake for a witch. A dozen raggy junior kids stood about, sick beyond death, mouldering, maggoty, squelchy-skinned, hair fallen out. She averted her gaze from the blinded eye, the scrofulous skull, the burnt match-stick legs.

  “Sheri went with you,” Mitzi reminded, and Jeni noticed her own big-wheeled old bike lying on its side on the concrete. “Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jeni.

  “How come you don’t know?”

  “What did ye find?” Jack asked her.

  “We found another village, a medieval one. It was the original Melfort. It had been pillaged. Ruined. Just dead bodies there. Something came out of the church. The Power. I blacked out.”

  Oh no she didn’t. She gave herself over to…somebody else, who was Jeni twisted in a crazy-house mirror. She went into the crazy house inside herself and hid there. Behind the warped mirror.

  “Next thing I know I’m here.”

  Jack eyed her with deep suspicion. Of course he would. How could any human being trust another?

  Mitzi nibbled her lip. “I like Sheri. I pray she’s all right.”

  Nothing to pray to excep
t a fiend. No one to turn to. Nothing to trust. Only grief. Grief be my guide, to further grief.

  “She’ll torn up.” Jack’s reassurance sounded unconvincing.

  “Shouldn’t we mount a search, down that road?”

  “No, pet.” Was he scared? “Aa think we’d best get on doing what the Power told us to. Are ye gannin’ to pitch in, Jen? It’ll keep yor mind off worryin’.”

  Off grief? No, grief was the air she breathed.

  But Sheri didn’t turn up until the next day; and she certainly didn’t turn up alive. Only Bess had turned up, tail between her legs, avoiding everyone. The next morning when the survivors pushed their way through the flock of corpses into St Mary’s, what had been Sheri lay on the altar.

  What had been her.

  “You stinking shit!” Mitzi screamed at the head in the cage. Jack had to restrain her from rushing at it. Nell was being sick in the aisle, and Bert stood ashen, trying to understand what he saw.

  “At least,” Jeni thought frozenly, “I couldn’t have murdered Sheri that way. Could I? – even with a fiend’s assistance?”

  Sheri, and the bike she had been riding, both occupied exactly the same space on the altar.

  The Moulton cycle had been inserted impossibly into her torn stretched naked body, crucifying her mechanically. Her bloody hands hung limply from the ends of handlebars which must run right through her arms, as bones. The grips stuck out of her palms like extra fingers. One wheel necklaced her, spokes needling inward to pierce her neck in a bastard halo. The top tube must be bracing her spine, as the saddle jutted out from her bottom. The down-tube and the seat-tube emerged behind her knees. Pedals poked from her ankles, the wings of Mercury, velocipede-style. Her right ear had been stretched to accommodate the bell. Her mouth gaped, lockjawked by the lamp.

  “Shit, shit!” shrieked Mitzi over and over till she was gasping for breath, and couldn’t shriek any longer.

  In the general silence that followed, the vicar enquired, “Would you rather bury her – or just ride her to the garage?”

  At first Nell insisted that only a woman should touch the other woman’s body to try to disentangle her, so as to lay her out decently and wrap the soiled altar cloth around her as a shroud. Only then could the men act as pall-bearers. Meanwhile they could employ themselves digging a grave. Right next to Felix.

  A shaking Mitzi offered to help. Jeni didn’t offer; the others were ignoring her. Not so the vicar. He winked at her repeatedly with a floppy, mouldy eyelid, a grotesque stooge’s semaphore signal designed to incriminate her. She went and stood with her back to the cage to hide this display, and now had to contend with a string of stage whispers, hoping that no one else heard. Thankfully the dead congregation were mumbling and glugging to themselves like gas shifting in bowels. Of course the vicar could have spoken louder but at the moment the Power favoured a nightmare of half-audible accusations in a whole cast of voices impersonating her one-time friends, as though these were all gossiping about her in some malicious limbo. Her head buzzed with the vile babble.

  Disentangling proved impossible. Sheri and the Moulton were part and parcel of each other as though an insane surgeon-magician had decided to create a new hybrid, of machine and human. After tugging and twisting futilely for ten minutes till she was as filthy with clotted blood and juice and oil and grease as a butcher-mechanic, Nell gave up. Obviously the Power had noted her garaging project and felt obliged to comment. The vicar had been busily imitating Nell’s voice behind Jeni’s back. “Hmm! So you should have been commissar of bikes? Resented my initiative, is that it? Thought you’d put a spanner in the works, hmm?”

  By then a shallow grave was ready, dug with spades from neighbouring garden sheds. When Jack and Bert had manhandled Sheri out to it, however, they had to lay her on the turf and broaden the hole considerably to take her outstretched, metal-braced arms.

  “I’m going to pop down to Sheri’s house,” announced Mitzi. “I’ll see if I can find a US flag to stick in the soil. She’d have liked that.”

  “Good idea,” agreed Bert, wiping sweat from his eyes. “She didn’t deserve this.”

  Bess ambled up, sniffed the crater in the soil with Sheri and the bicycle lying cupped in it, cocked a leg and peed. Oddly, this seemed like respect, a marking of Sheri and her resting place as part of acceptable animal territory, a recuperation of that body tortured into something mechanical, as true flesh once more – and a keep-off warning to anything that might disturb it.

  Thirty-four

  Jack, Bert, Mitzi, Nell, and Bess.

  And Jeni.

  Four survivors. A dog. And one more.

  They could hardly give her the cold shoulder for too long…or was it Jeni who was giving them the cold face?

  Five survivors in a village of rotting zombies in a world destroyed had to try to get on together. That only made sense. (In a world ruled by nonsense triumphant? By vicious nonsense?) In fact they could hardly meet Jeni’s eyes – or she theirs – without the question arising, “Who’s next?”

  And yet, what had she done?

  They were all in the White Lion that same noon for another liquid lunch. Tom Tate, returned from church, manned his bar like some performing seal which had been coated in drippy, reeking grey glue; not much of a performance. With a nod to him, Jack squeezed past to collect a four-pack of Fosters, which were the last cans left in the pub, and to pour a Captain Morgan for Bert from an almost empty bottle. After a few moments’ heart-searching and internal struggle he thrust one can at Jeni, who accepted it gratefully.

  “Er, Jen, divven’t take this the wrong way, but Aa’m shiftin’ oot o’ yor place. Aa’ll move in with Bert.”

  “Yes. Of course. I understand.” She’d lost his affection, been robbed of it. How could a man feel any trust or liking for a woman who might destroy him fiendishly? Might cause his death in some novel, nauseating fashion.

  “We’re aal vulnerable now,” Jack remarked to no one in particular. “One by one. Eenie meenie mynie mo.”

  “I didn’t…,” began Jeni.

  Mitzi glared at her with hatred and sick fear. The hatred was a clothing for the fear.

  “We all still have to work together,” Nell said firmly. “We must get May Day properly organized. You’d think – the Power might have considered that!”

  “Did the Nazis consider the comfort of the fiddlers at the gates of Auschwitz?” Mitzi asked. “If part of a quartet dropped dead that still left a trio. Then a duet. Finally a soloist. Who’ll be the soloist in this little concert of ours, I wonder? Who will applaud her? What will her reward be? Maybe I wouldn’t want her sort of reward.”

  Shaking helplessly, Jeni snapped, “Maybe you wouldn’t want to be fucked by a corpse!”

  Mitzi recoiled as if a curse had been slapped on her. It was Bert who recognized the distress – not the venom – written on Jeni’s face.

  “Is that what happened between you and Gareth? Is that what the Power made you do?”

  “Yes, yes! Or else it would have dragged Felix out of his grave. That’s what I did for Sheri.”

  “And maybe it made you hate her,” murmured Nell.

  Mitzi recovered herself. “Oh great! A ritual fuck,” she sneered. “A filthy black magic rite – part of its frigging pattern – and you went along with it. Naturally!”

  “What do you suggest? I should let the boy burrow out of his grave with his guts round his neck?”

  At least Mitzi was speaking to her. Perhaps it would have been better if she wasn’t, for the skinny blonde girl retorted with hideous, offbeam insight:

  “So here’s the ritual climax: Sheri crucified on a bicycle! Climax, did I say? Oh ho. Frigging foreplay, more likely. Us next. Or will it be,” and she cast around, “will it be Bess for a spot of lezzy bestiality and disembowelment?”

  “No! Not Bess! Never!”

  Mitzi peered at her. “You can choose your victims, can you? That’s interesting. What a remarkable change from Jeni the Re
d bustling around our peace camp, buzzing off to meetings, mounting demos, blaring about emergency powers! Satan and his sister joined the peace movement, but they couldn’t behave like members of the human race forever. Oh no. The sham broke down.”

  Jeni felt that Mitzi had opened a hole into her head, into her heart, and had stuck a microscope inside to reveal the surging virulent microbes of her memories and the imps that hid behind those memories.

  “Hang on a minute,” said Bert. “Felix and his mum were both American. I think something had it in for Americans. Well, there aren’t any more Americans left to pick on. Not live ones, anyway. So why should we be next?”

  “Why shouldn’t we be?” Mitzi asked softly; she seemed to have run out of steam.

  “I…I honestly don’t know how Sheri died,” said Jeni. “I respected her. I almost loved her.”

  But she did know. In general terms she knew. She could well imagine Sheri’s torment in that medieval village at the hands or claws of that thing dressed as a monk, assisted by a witch fully familiar with the devil’s ways, the terms of service. Sheri’s son had his insides pulled out. She had been stuffed – with a bike. How symmetrical her death had been. Pray that Sheri had died quickly.

  Pray to what?

  Lies. Betrayal. She had loved Sheri -in what style?

  Mitzi was guessing the truth. Did that mean Mitzi was in danger now? But what was the truth? That Jeni contained her own private fiend? Or that she was being led to believe this? Lured, and hoodwinked? And this was just one more twist of the Power’s torture. If she accepted this “truth” she would finally and entirely betray herself.

  “Could I have a rum too, Jack?”

  “Pirate’s parrot-juice? Wey aye, pet. Looks like the last ’un.” He sounded glad to be asked. Glad because she was reacting within normal human bounds? Glad because he had escaped from her immediate clutches?

  Accepting the shot of Captain Morgan, she said, “You don’t need to walk on eggs with me.”

  “Eh?”

  “You don’t need to watch your step when I’m around. If anyone cracks it’ll be me.” But was that true?