by Heide Goody
“Let’s see,” said Cameron.
The display case had a latch and a lock but second’s brutish waggling with a thin key in the gap forced the latch up.
Nina ran through the teaching block. She’d not yet found the lu’crik oyh or the sports hall. It was a confusing place, possibly because of the dimension-bending qualities of Venislarn design or possibly because it was a school. At every classroom door she yelled at the students to shut it and keep hidden. She could hear Morag doing the same on some other level.
Mrs Cook-Mammonson appeared at the top of the stairs ahead and held out a hand.
“There will be no running in the corridors, Miss Seth,” the headteacher said curtly.
“You adn-bhul kidding me?”
“Or swearing.”
The Mammonite woman didn’t look like a woman whose school had just been invaded by killer pondlife.
“There’s a lu’crik oyh loose in y–”
“I’m perfectly aware,” said Cook-Mammonson. “I should be insulted by the insinuation that I wouldn’t be but the opinion of a woman of your low education is hardly –”
“It’s dangerous!”
“It’s someone’s pet,” said the headteacher.
“An adn-bhul dangerous pet.”
“I shall not warn you about your swearing again. You do not have authorisation to be here. This is a gross breach of protocol. You are interfering with the scheduled lessons of the school.”
“It will eat the students!”
Cook-Mammonson gave her a tiredly superior look. “And if it does?”
Nina was speechless.
“What is school?” said the headteacher smoothly, “It is a testing ground. It exists to winnow the chaff from the grain, to separate the weak from the strong. And if a student is eaten, then what?”
“You’re adn-bhul mad.”
“Third time, Miss Seth.” Something bony moved under the skin beneath the Mammonite’s cheek. “You will leave now and allow us to return to our timetabled lessons.”
Nina shook her head, furious, and made to go past the headteacher. The Mammonite grabbed her elbow to stop her and Nina decided the time to be a professional was over. She punched the headteacher in the face, hard. Nina had boys for cousins and she had learned how to punch. The Mammonite didn’t go down immediately so Nina punched her again.
Cook-Mammonson fell to her knees. Behind the mask of her skin, something truly hideous occurred and any illusions that this thing was human were gone. Nina punched her again.
“You dare touch us!” spat the Mammonite, struggling with a tongue and jaw that were no longer shaped for human speech. “You are too stupid to know fear?”
The creature still had hold of Nina so she punched it a fourth time. The thing let go and slumped the floor.
“This girl isn’t afraid of nothing,” said Nina.
Cook-Mammonson made a noise that might have been a laugh.
“That was a double negative, idiot!”
“I was using it for deliberate emphasis, bitch,” said Nina and stalked off.
“Just you wait,” hollered Cook-Mammonson through bloodied lips. “When our mother rises in all her glory and takes this city again, you will plead for death.”
“Yeah?” Nina shouted back. “Well, I’m calling Ofsted. So, who’s in trouble now, eh?”
She hurried down the stairs.
“Through here,” Morag called to her, standing at a pair of double doors.
Nina followed her through a canteen area.
“The thing’s behind those screen doors,” said Morag. “The sports hall…” She pointed to another set of double doors.
The huge high space of the sports hall, benches along the sides, tape marking out the courts and areas for various games on the floor, brought memories flooding back to Nina, few of them particularly happy ones. Getting thrashed at volleyball by taller girls, getting told off for having too much fun while playing badminton with Anita and Saba… Sports halls had been, in her experience, places of belittlement, oppression and soul-crushing boredom. That said, the sports halls Nina recalled did not have rows of rifles in racks, stacks of munitions to one side and concrete-backed targets at one end. PE at school might have been more fun if they had.
Morag ran her hand along the rifle rack. “These aren’t even locked away.”
“Mammonites,” said Nina. “If one of them wants to go postal, that’s their lookout.” She considered the empty slots on the rack. “It looks like some already have.”
In the large hall, the sound of a rifle bolt echoed loudly. A school boy stood, taking aim at them over the top of one of the concrete targets. Another came up at the target beside him.
“We’re here to help,” said Morag.
“Leave now or we shoot,” said the first boy.
“We’re not leaving,” said Nina, walking slowly towards them.
The boy aimed deliberately low and shot a groove in the floor just off to Nina’s right.
“The lu’crik oyh is in the room next door. Together we can take it down.”
“It’s her,” said another voice and a girl stepped out. Nina recognised the blonde pigtails, the constantly spiteful expression and the plush toy clutched in her arms.
“It’s Yang, isn’t it?” said Nina.
“We should have killed you,” said Yang.
“Maybe,” said Nina. “That can wait. We do need your help.”
“We don’t help,” the girl spat. “And only the weak ask for it.”
“Right,” said Nina, “because everyone gets one chance, yeah?”
“And this is it,” said Yang.
Nina walked up to her and held up her fist. Her knuckles had split from the pounding she’d given the headteacher and some of the Mammonite’s blood smeared the back of her fingers.
“Then I’m giving you a chance,” said Nina.
Yang began to sneer at the threat and then sniffed. Her gaze narrowed. “Cook-Mammonson?”
“You better believe it,” said Nina.
“Or we could pay you to help us,” offered Morag and held out a thick wodge of filthy notes.
“It’s dirty,” said Yang.
“It’s still money,” said Morag. “I mean, we did get it out of a drug dealer’s wallet so it is sort of dirty but…”
“Drug dealer?” said one of the boys. “That’s pretty hardcore.”
Yang looked at the money. She was at least thinking about it.
Using the bicycle as a lure had worked. It had really worked. Two or three circuits of Dickens Heath village (it was hard to tell what was new and what wasn’t) and Rod had eight of the beasts following him, including a massive one-eyed freak apparently trailing a net and ton of gardening equipment behind it.
The problem now, Rod realised, was what the hell to do next. He was riding the metaphorical tiger. He had what he wanted but the moment he stopped he was dead. Ahead was the bridge on which he’d initially abandoned his car. One of the Morags was there. She had a phone to her ear and was shouting at him. He accelerated towards her. She pointed vigorously.
“The school! To the school!”
That didn’t make a whole lot of sense, taking a herd of predators into a kiddies’ school, not unless they wanted to solve the spider-fish problem at the same time as classroom overcrowding.
“Go!” shouted Morag and slid into the car as the first lu’crik oyh came barrelling by.
Morag Junior pocketed her phone.
“Okay,” she declared to the sports hall. “We have a plan. And I use that term in the loosest possible sense.”
She threw open the external double doors of the sports hall and then hurried back to the shelter of the concrete targets they had piled up as a barricade.
Cameron Barnes had an impressive repertoire of Venislarn incantations. Vivian had mixed feelings in that regard. Of the two candidates, he was clearly the greater Venislarn scholar but, seeing him touch the pen to the scar on his neck and to his tongue and then
balance it on his fingertip – speaking in the tongues of aklo all the while – made her uneasy. He might not be the first human to have “gone Venislarn” but she was disinclined to be the first to appoint such a person to a role within the Birmingham consular mission.
Nonetheless, his knowledge was proving useful. He stood on the pavement outside the Pen Museum and weighed the black nib on his fingertip.
“That way,” he said, nodding down the hill towards the city centre.
“Very good, Mr Barnes,” said Vivian. “Dr Kaur, you’re driving.”
Morag Senior fought the car through a fishtail turn onto the school driveway, snapped the flimsy car park barrier off against the windscreen and accelerated on towards the sports hall. A distance away to her left, Rod had cycled in through the student pedestrian entrance – his cheeks puffing and his rhythm faltering but still a bike-length ahead of the snarling, love-crazed lu’crik oyh.
“He’s gonna need a bigger bike,” commented Steve the Destroyer.
“He’s fine,” said Senior.
She steered tightly through a car park crowded with Audis and Jags – either human teachers vastly underexaggerated their salaries or Mammonites commanded higher fees – and then slammed her foot on the brake when she saw the sports hall entrance. Steve slapped against the windscreen and fell onto the dashboard. She grabbed him, leapt out and ran into the sports hall.
“They’re coming!” she yelled before she even saw the figures crouched behind the targets. She ran towards them. “Do not shoot at Rod!”
She gave a start as a lu’crik oyh crawled in from a side room. Rifles cracked and she flung her hands up to shield her face and veered away.
“And don’t shoot me!”
She had barely made it to the barricade when Rod rode in, cycling hard across the floor. Senior scuttled behind the targets and peered round. Just outside the double doors, two lu’crik oyh fought over which would be first with the squealing female that was Rod on his bike. He was going to be such a sexual disappointment, she thought.
Ten metres from the barricade, he awkwardly threw himself from the bike, rolled and ran low for cover. The lu’crik oyh charged forward into a volley of shots from the Mammonite kids. Senior grabbed a rifle, raised it over the top of a target and tried to remember what little she knew about the workings of a gun.
“Shoot them! Shoot them now!” cried Steve.
Morag Junior looked across from the other end of the line. “Steve? How the hell…?”
Rod had picked up a rifle and started shooting before Senior even had remembered how on earth she was supposed to manually chamber the first round.
Out in the centre of the sports hall, some very optimistic lu’crik oyh shoved and barged one another away from the prized bicycle while the school defence forces shot divots of armoured flesh out of their hides. Others spun in confusion and rage at the attack. It was only a matter of time before they realised where the pain was coming from.
Senior spotted the one-eyed net-covered monstrosity among the pile of rolling creatures.
“The Broil King Super Gem!” she shouted. “Shoot the Broil King Super Gem!”
Rod gave her a quizzical look.
“The barbecue!” she shouted over the gunshots.
Rod nodded and resumed firing.
“Twenty quid to the first one to shoot the barbecue!” yelled Nina.
Two or three shots sparked off the black metal lid of a wheeled barbecue that hung, snagged, in the lu’crik oyh’s net. A second later a bullet – it would be impossible to tell whose – punctured the gas cylinder underneath.
“Kids! Down!” barked Rod but no one had time.
The flash was momentarily blinding. The bang left Senior’s ears ringing for much longer. Something heavy smashed into the basketball board above their heads and dropped wetly to the ground before the targets. By the time Senior had come to herself once more the exploding gas had burned itself out.
Everything was suddenly still.
Rod stepped round the barricade and approached the lu’crik oyh. Chunks of lu’crik oyh decorated most of the floor, much of the walls and, here and there, bits of the ceiling. Steve the Destroyer leapt from Senior’s shoulder and ran out into the hall, giving a good post-mortem slapping to any lumps of lu’crik oyh he passed. The air stank of smoke and something that was almost like cooked fish but not quite.
Rod walked among the lu’crik oyh, putting three bullets in each one that remained remotely whole. The Mammonite children cautiously followed him, weapons ready.
“Fleshling!” shouted Steve. “Take a picture of me, victorious!”
The doll man stood beside the severed upper body and head of the one-eyed lu’crik oyh. Morag Junior went forward, taking her phone out.
A soft toy on the floor, incongruous in this place, caught Senior’s eye. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. She had held one just like it in a marketing meeting at the office some weeks before. She remembered the googly eyes and the entirely inappropriate tartan spines. It was meant to be Yoth Mammon. If only the gods really were this cuddly…
“This is one of the My Little Venislarn dolls,” she said.
“It belongs to Yang there,” said Nina, beside her.
“I didn’t think these toys ever went into production. Just one of Chad and Leandra’s stupid ideas that went nowhere.”
Nina shrugged and sniffed deeply.
“Is it wrong to say that smell makes me hungry for fish and chips?”
Senior laughed weakly.
“I think if you want fish and chips you deserve them.”
There was the sound of approaching sirens.
“I’ll get one of Ricky’s boys to pick some up for me.”
Rod shouldered his rifle, spoke to the Mammonite children – Senior couldn’t hear what he said but the body language was of a captain congratulating his troops – and walked stiffly back to the barricades.
“I’ve never cycled so hard,” he said with a faint groan. “My thighs are burning.”
“You did good, old man,” said Nina.
“Gonna need some Deep Heat rubbed on them and no mistake. Any volunteers?”
“I said you did good,” said Nina. “I didn’t say you cured cancer. Do your own rubbing.”
Morag Junior was taking several snaps of tiny Steve the Destroyer leaning up against the head of his trophy. The pabash kaj doll gave the lolling jaw of the dead beast a merry kick.
“Smile, you son of a bitch!”
Senior considered the doll in her hands.
Ray trudged along the canal path. He was wet and now he was cold too. The only direction he had chosen was away. He wasn’t going back into Birmingham. He wasn’t going back to his selfish mum – no Terry’s All Gold or miniature Baileys for her! He’d had enough. His geography beyond the city wasn’t great but he’d walk until he got to a main road, catch a lift to somewhere he could beg or steal some clothes and then he’d start again. No more Jeffney Ray. This lone wolf would take on a new name, find fresh flocks to prey on.
Distracted by his own misery, he only slowly became aware of the faint splashing and the slow bow wave drawing close behind him. He turned and saw, with the calm horror of a nightmare, the Black Barge. It followed him at little more than a walking pace. There was no one at the tiller, no faces visible at the dark membranous windows.
Ray stopped. His heart pounded in his cold chest.
“I was going to find you!” he called out to the boat. “I was going to bring you the money.”
The Black Barge slowed.
“I just ran into some difficulties, that’s all,” he said.
The Black Barge drifted.
“It was just three hundred quid, right?” he said. “I can get that tomorrow. Double even.”
No movement on deck. It was a ghost of a barge, a desiccated shell, a discarded insect casing.
“Ten years we said,” said Ray. “That thing about a hundred was just a joke. I will get you the
money. Whatever you want.”
Still no life on board. Ray’s fear gave way to irritation, anger and bravado. It wasn’t like an empty canal barge was even remotely threatening. Yeah, it looked like something force-grown from bone or constructed by nest-building insects but it was still a bloody canal barge. It was about as spooky as a pedalo.
“You know what, fuck you!” he shouted. “That money? You can whistle for it. What are you going to do?” He took a step back from the path, onto the grassy verge. “Go back to your bosses and tell them you failed!”
The Black Barge jigged closer to the shore, bobbing in a sideways motion that seemed quite wrong for a barge.
“I’m not scared of you!” he shouted.
The Black Barge suddenly lifted upwards from the canal. Water streamed down a hull that was not a hull. The bony lines of the window frames of the barge ran down over the shell – or was it the head crest? – of the giant creature beneath. Barnacles clustered around her black shark eyes. Pond weed, frayed strands of rope and the dredged detritus of a hundred canals dangled like a beard beneath her whale jaw. Rising from a depth far greater than the canal, the goddess stretched her bleached white limbs, her uneven water-smoothed fingers. The barge, her skull crest, was now gone from sight above Ray.
“Yoth-Qahake-Pysh,” Ray whispered, hoarsely.
She reached out dreamily for Ray. Ray’s mind, drowning, reached for whatever it could.
“Skeidl hraim yeg courxean. Oyo-map-ehu merishimsha meren’froi,” he breathed. Do not kill me, honoured friend. I was only admiring your beauty. “Skeidl hraim yeg courxean. Oyo-map-ehu merishimsha meren’froi.”
Her fingers, each as fat as a ship’s mast, curled around him. She was gentle. She didn’t want to damage him. As she lifted him, Ray instinctively grabbed her topmost finger for support. He had moved beyond fear into a blank insanity. His lips moved but his mind no longer knew what the words meant. He had never really got to grips with spoken Venislarn but she took what little he had from him. He had never known as much magic as he would have liked and she took that from him too. Yoth-Qahake-Pysh, Goddess of the Deep, sank beneath the surface and Ray went with her.
