Jago (57 page)

Jessica ran from the verandah, but stumbled before she could reach her boyfriend. Paul caught her and pulled her back. She was sobbing, mind dissolved. She stopped fighting and clung, pouring tears into his chest.

‘See what you’ve done, man,’ Dolar said, still dazed.

Maskell didn’t look ashamed, but made no more violent moves. He wasn’t rooted, but he was standing straight, waiting for his son. The Green Woman and her daughter brought the boy forward and made him kneel before Maskell, bowing his head. Maskell used his sword-length of penis to tap Jeremy on the shoulders, like the Queen dubbing a knight.

Jessica was chewing his shirt, deep sobs racking both their bodies. Dolar and Syreeta were staring at the whole thing. Salim, Paul realized, was dead. The horse stood placidly, unperturbed.

The Maskell family closed around Jeremy, tendrils twined between them, swarming around the boy, caging him in. The Green Man and the Green Woman joined at chest and loins, ivy creepers intertwining, secreted gums hardening together. Paul still saw Jeremy’s expressionless face as his sister forced him further into the middle of the clump. The family put down roots, lawn around them churning as they spread under the earth. The bodies twisted in their foliage, coming together like the bole of a tree, thick bark spreading around them. Jeremy’s face was covered.

The sky was red now, an orange light spilling across the village, casting dark shadows. Jessica went quiet and slumped exhausted in a faint. Birds scratched the air in a dawn chorus, but Alder was otherwise momentarily quiet. Dolar and Syreeta approached the Maskell Tree, tempted to touch—perhaps to worship—the green Spirit. Paul heard grass growing. Soon, everything would wake up. The world disclosed would be changed beyond recognition. There was dew on his face.

The Maskell Tree shot up, branches extending, twigs sprouting where fingers and thumbs had been, clumps of fruit swelling. Nourished by Ferg’s blood, the foliage looked rich and healthy in comparison with the premature autumn of trees nearby. The horse stood scratching its head against the bark, and stretched up, picking an applelike fruit with its teeth and crunching it down. The tree sighed, its branches stirring slightly, exhaled air reverberating musically through pores in the wood. Paul walked over. The horse was nervous with him near, and whinnied. Dolar and Syreeta were smiling, holding hands.

‘Beautiful,’ they said. He had lost all his followers to death or surrender.

With the dawn, the tree calmed, individual members of the family melding and losing consciousness. The green-grey bark was mottled red, the last traces of Ferg. Gingerly, he fingertip-touched the tree. It didn’t bite him or suck his blood. He pressed his hand to the bark. It felt like any other tree, although he could tell from the curve that he was touching what had been Sue-Clare Maskell’s back. He could still make out shoulderblades and the line of her spine.

‘Jeremy,’ he said. If the boy could hear him, he could not answer. The tree shook a little, a few fruit falling with thumps to the lawn. Paul felt absurd. ‘Jeremy,’ he asked, ‘are you in there?’

Nothing. The tree was quiet, still. Jeremy was another loss.

Tired, he wanted sleep. Even to fall into a dead faint like Jessica would have been an escape. But if he slept, he would miss what came next. He might not wake up. Although he felt as if he had been put through a mangle, his mind was racing too fast to allow sleep to crawl over him.

Syreeta and Dolar were cuddled together, backs to the Maskell Tree, trying to get comfortable, ready to sleep in its shade. Ferg’s blood was a bright-red smear on the house, on the lawn. His body lay neglected, a thrown-away, special-effects dummy.

Paul listened. The birds had stopped singing. Everything was calm, as if a multitude had collapsed into the sleepless quiet that was overtaking the hippie couple. Beyond the Pottery, thousands must be lying like them, waiting for the next surprise.

He was sure the seed of it all was the Agapemone. The place where Hazel was.

He wandered away from the Maskell Tree, around to the open front gate. The road was still liberally covered with bodies, dead or otherwise. A few animals picked their way between them. A man in a three-piece suit lay face up in the gutter by the Pottery. Sitting on his chest was a creature the size of a small monkey, beet-red and hairless, with a long whip of a tail, and barbed, webbed hands and feet. It stuck its head up and looked both ways quickly, like a nervous road-crosser following the safety code, then dipped its sharp mouth to the hole it had dug in the body, tearing a chunk loose. The animal had horns, pointed ears and vestigial gargoyle wings. Seeing Paul, the creature squawked in alarm and scurried off as fast as a rabbit, zigzagging up the road, bouncing off cars and walls. He had no idea what the thing was, but he’d seen it in plain daylight.

Across the moors, a sound came. A rhythmic beating, blades slicing through the air. Helicopters. Paul looked at the dots on the horizon, and waited.

‘F
resh eggs…’

The war was working out swell for everyone, Pfc Harry Steyning thought. He’d be grease-monkeying B-24s and chasing skirts for the next couple of years, and Ivor and Bernard would toil draft-exempt down on the farm to feed the khaki masses. None of them would be dodging bullets, unless someone got wind of these late-night exchanges in the woods. Bernard Conway had his shotgun with him, to fend off hungry hijackers. He was disappointed that being a farmboy kept him out of the fight, although not for patriotic reasons. Eyes shining in the twilight, Bernard reminded Harry of his cousin Floyd.

‘…fresh butter…’

It wasn’t easy in the dark to match items, but he didn’t think Albert Pym would gyp the US Army. He stood to rake in dollars as long as the air base at Achelzoy was running and Colonel Colley had a hankering for more than powdered egg and beans.

‘…fresh cream… tasty, eh?’

Ivor and Bernard stamped heavy-booted feet in the cold, breaths frosting. It was the first really bone-freezing night, English drizzle creeping through his uniform, sinking into his skin.

‘Three sides of beef…’

The goods were stacked in the back of the jeep, ready to be tethered under a tarpaulin. Harry didn’t have to be back on the base before dawn. That gave him time to pay a call on Annie. After this jaunt, he could do with a warm welcome.

‘…two mutton…’

The list was in his head. He knew better than to be caught with an inventory. The brass hats would throw him to the wolves; then he’d be in the guardhouse for black-market activities, sentenced by Colonel Colley, who’d made out the list in the first goddamn place, who’d be getting fat on these eggs and cream. By the same reckoning, Ivor and Bernard would take the fall for profiteering, while their boss Albert Pym, the big-shot farmer in Alder, sat on his magistrate’s bench and tutted at their intolerable behaviour. That was the way it always worked when a kid and Pop had regularly been shaken down by his best ’shine customers, the sheriff and the circuit judge.

‘…a whole pig…’

In the most gentlemanly way, Colonel Colley and Albert Pym had agreed to dispense with the formalities in supplying the officers’ mess. Harry, on general-issue rations, would barely get a lick of what he was picking up. He was only ground crew, and this provender was for fly-boys. A waste, really. Most heroes upchucked anything they ate as soon as they drew the first flak over France, or when they tumbled, miraculously alive, back to the tarmac at Achelzoy. The ones who didn’t come back presumably wouldn’t have given a flying crap what they had for their last supper.

‘…assorted vegetable produce…’

There were advantages that went with this off-the-record detail. The use of the jeep and nights away from the base put him on the inside track with Annie.

‘…and what’s in these kegs?’

Ivor Gilpin grinned and Bernard’s creepy eyes glowed. ‘Scrumpy, Yank,’ Ivor said. ‘Cider. Strong drink. Have the roof o’ yer mouth off.’

‘Swell,’ he said. ‘Local moonshine, right? You should try the stuff from Pop’s still.’

‘Cowboy drink, sir?’ said Bernard, drawing out the word ‘cowboy’ with withering contempt.

‘Not many cowboys in Kentucky, pal,’ Harry said. These people had no idea. To them, America was all cowboys and gangsters. Annie’s younger sister Vanessa had asked him if he’d been there when the monkey fell from the big building in New York.

Harry dug out a pack of cigarettes and offered them around. He flipped his Zippo, and Pym’s labourers dipped their heads to suck flame.

‘Three on a match,’ he said, lighting up his own smoke. ‘Bad luck.’

‘Arr, sir,’ purred Bernard, cig ends reflecting in his eyes like firefly sparks. ‘So I heard.’

Ivor called him ‘Yank’, Bernard called him ‘sir’. Ivor was okay, but Bernard reminded Harry more and more of his cousin. Floyd had raped his thirteen-year-old sister and drowned her in the creek. After a tri-state manhunt, he’d wound up dead in a shootout with the FBI. Like Bernard, Floyd had been polite all the time, but with a slight curl to his lip that made it obvious he didn’t mean it.

‘Pop told me that was from the First War. German snipers could zero on the third light. One for the alert. Two to get the range. Three, pop, bang, brains in your helmet. Just like that.’

As he snapped his fingers, something nearby exploded. Light hit first, an eye-punishing flash. Then the sound, then the wind. Strong enough to lift Ivor and Bernard off their feet, it rammed Harry against the jeep. His shoulder and hip took the blow, and pain shuddered through him. For a moment, he thought he’d been hit by shrapnel. Blast still drumming a Gene Krupa frenzy in his ears, he heard hail-like patter. Pebbles and earth rained on them. A foul smell stung his nostrils and he tasted vomit in the back of his throat. His gasmask was under the dash of the jeep, strapped uselessly in its case.

His eyes stung as he blinked, unable to get rid of the afterbursts of the flash. In the sky, he thought he saw a flying cross-shape. An airplane? It seemed to flit rather than fly, zigzagging like a bird or a bat, not looming through the air like a bomber. He couldn’t be sure what he saw. Light still lingered on the surface of his eyes. Harry was coated in dust. Nearby, there was a fire. Ivor was already on his knees, shaking his head and coughing, and Bernard was calmly standing, face a mask of earth in which his eyes shone like neons. They were both okay.

‘A dumper,’ he said. ‘It must have been…’

The Germans wouldn’t want to bomb Alder Hill. They had never, despite the drills, even gone for the air base. Harry guessed the plane was a straggler from a raid on Bristol or Bath, sagging low and heavy in the sky, no idea where its target was. He knew from listening to the crews what that was like, sitting on a ton of potential explosion, looking for somewhere—anywhere—to dump the load, looking for a light below.

Three on a match. A tiny flame in a blacked-out forest of dark. Bernard was walking towards the fire, Ivor following. It couldn’t have been Harry’s Zippo. The explosion had come too swiftly after the flame. No bombardier could target and drop that quickly. From base scuttlebutt, he knew it seemed eternity between targeting and the big bang, that they were lucky to get a single bomb within five hundred yards of the objective.

‘Hold up,’ he shouted, pulling himself up, ‘wait for me…’

Hand pressed to his side, he loped after the Somerset men. It could have been a crash, he thought. But they hadn’t heard a struggling plane, something hed have recognized under any conditions. This explosion had literally come from nowhere. Up ahead, Bernard approached an apparent wall of flame and was silhouetted against it. Then he vanished, as if he had walked into a concealed hollow behind a waterfall. Harry waited for the next explosion, as the shells in Bernard’s gun blew.

Ivor half turned and sank in sideways, also tugged into the flame curtain. He passed into fire, a distinct line washing across his face. Harry wished he’d brought his gun. He still heard after-ringing and saw dazzling blobs, but was getting over the initial blast. This wasn’t like a usual fire. It didn’t seem to be burning, and it wasn’t giving off smoke or smell. Flames were swelling straight against trees, but leaves and branches weren’t catching light. It wasn’t even hot. His breath was still clouding.

Harry hoped he wasn’t caught up in some Buck Rogers secret-weapon shit. There were rumours around the base about egghead scientists playing with death rays and jet planes. The Nazis were supposed to be developing something that could disintegrate you with sound vibrations the way Deanna Durbin broke glasses.

There was a newly gouged depression in the hillside. The air was thick with soil-tasting dust. The funny fire nestled in the dent, cupped and contained.

‘Ivor,’ Harry called, ‘are you okay?’

He stepped forwards and touched the fire. It burned and stung like regular fire, but he couldn’t pull away. He was sucked in, as if the explosion were reversed and everything displaced was violently pulled back, Pfc Harry Steyning along with it. There was a tingling moment of agony as he was jerked through the flame barrier, and he found himself in a new-made clearing, hot shingles under his boots, surrounded by an overturned bowl of white. Bernard and Ivor were there. And someone else. The Somerset men were bending over, examining the figure writhing on the ground.

‘Parachutist,’ Bernard said.

‘Spy,’ Ivor echoed.

‘Nazzy bugger,’ Bernard spat, hawking a gobbet of slime at the shingles, where it hissed.

‘Let me see,’ Harry said, pushing in.

‘Look,’ Bernard said, pointing, ‘Nazzy stuff.’

The ‘parachutist’ was a woman, dressed more like Wilma Deering, Buck Rogers’s girlfriend, than the daughters of Mata Hari Goebbels was supposed to be infiltrating into Britain. She wore a tight, one-piece flying suit of a dark and sparkly material Harry had never seen before, a bit like opaque nylon. She had black, ankle-high spike-heel boots with silver trimmings and pointed toes, a belt made out of scorched chain-link letters that spelled out
SEX DEATH SEX
, and enough necklaces and arm bangles for a Dorothy Lamour pagan princess. Her white face was streaked with black where her lipstick and eye make-up had run, her hair a bushy tangle of black twice the size of her head.