Read Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi Online
Authors: John Grant
Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (8 page)
"Are you nuts, fat boy? That's Jill Soames's niece, Joanna. She's only a slip of a girl."
"He's right," someone said, sounding puzzled.
A hand reached down to help her up. She clutched gratefully at the strong arm, then released it almost at once, tipping back towards the floor.
This must only be Steve, in another of his incarnations.
The hand grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet.
He wasn't Steve. His face was sombre as he looked her over. She guessed he was about her own age. Sand-coloured hair, just too long and just too short to be fashionable, fell over his forehead. He was wearing black-rimmed glasses.
"Are you all right?" said her rescuer.
"Joanna," Greta from the Crafts Centre whined from behind him, "has something been going on?"
You were within seconds of pulling me to pieces, that's what was going on.
"Take me out of here," she said to the sand-haired man. "I need fresh air. Help me."
His side felt reassuringly strong against hers as she hugged him to her.
"Help me," she said again.
~
"I know you," she said twenty minutes later. They were walking among the ancient gravestones that surrounded St Leonard's. No one had been buried here in the church's original plot for over two hundred years; nowadays the graves were dug in the New Cemetery, as it was called, on the far side of the Ham's Lane playing fields. "I've seen you before somewhere."
"I've seen you before, too," he said. "You used to come and visit Jill Soames every now and then. She introduced us once, in the street. I'm Ian Piper."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't ..."
"It's all right. Lots of people don't."
"I'll remember you now, though," she said after a pause. "I'll remember you for the rest of my life. Which I think you've just saved, back in there."
She gestured towards the silent church building. No one had followed them out, yet now the edifice seemed deserted. Perhaps they'd all slunk away shamefacedly through the exit by the vicarage garden.
"A small labour." He looked embarrassed. "I was passing, and heard the noise. I thought a rat must have attacked the Bloody Bell-ringers, or something."
"The Bloody Bell-ringers," said Joanna. "That's what my aunt used to call them. The Bloody Bell-ringers."
"I liked Jill. She and I felt the same way about the bell-ringers." He grinned suddenly. "The same robust way."
"Forthright," she countered.
"Unsubtle."
"Forceful."
She giggled. It was a game Aunt Jill had played, but only when she was secure in her company. This man must indeed have known her well. Unlike Ronnie Gilmour, for example, who had claimed so much.
"You need to get cleaned up," he said. "I don't like to be the one to say it, but ..."
"I smell a lot."
"I was thinking more of the blood on your clothes. And the dust on your face. For all the Reverend James Daker's holiness, he's never shown very much interest in keeping St Leonard's clean. You do look a shambles."
"I guess I must." She looked down at her hands. The right was covered in blood from where she'd torn Rupert's face open. "I'd best get back to the flat."
"I'm worried about leaving you alone."
"I'll be OK."
"They might come for you again."
She considered this. She didn't think it was likely – the people seemed to have been caught up in some blinding spell, which Ian had broken by his arrival among them. But it was possible.
"I can't let you come back to the flat with me," she said at length. "If you think that I look a mess ..." The attack in the church had made her sober, and now the memories of what the flat looked like – and smelt like – were becoming oppressively clear.
"I understand," he said, and in a strange way she thought that he probably did. "Well, my house probably isn't all that much better, but the towels are clean and the water's hot."
She looked at his eyes. They seemed guileless. "You won't ...?" she began.
"You'll be safe," he said. "I'm just offering you my bath, and maybe a meal, after. I haven't got any clandestine motives, if that's what you're concerned about."
She trusted him.
"Apart from anything else," he said, "I just happen to be gay."
She stopped in her tracks. "You're the writer," she said. "I do remember you now."
"Not much of a writer," he said. "I'm basically just long-term unemployed. I write things sometimes, but I don't often finish them."
"I thought you were only
reputedly
gay, rather than the real thing? I thought you were enigmatic about it. Aunt Jill never seemed to be quite certain."
She took his arm and walked beside him out through the churchyard gate.
"I don't make a habit of telling people about it – especially not here in Ashburton." He put his hand over hers, as if they were an elderly couple promenading along the front at Margate. "But with you it doesn't matter if you know or not."
She smiled. "I don't matter, hmm?"
"I didn't mean it that way," he said hurriedly. "It's just that ... Well, the reason I keep quiet about my sexuality in Ashburton is because, to a lot of the locals, it makes me some kind of pariah. That's why you've never seen me in the Blue Horse, for example. I don't know if it was Jas who banned me from the place first or if it was just that I got fed up with all the abuse he used to yell at me every time I went in there. It's the same at the Customs House: the bikers would beat me to a pulp without a second thought, and most of the other regulars would applaud them for it."
"They're a bunch of real bastards down there," Joanna agreed. "But what makes you think I'm any better than they are?"
"Don't you see?" He stopped on the pavement half-way up West Street and came around in front of her. The eyes looking earnestly into hers were sky blue. "I feel safe to tell you anything about myself because you're just like me."
"I'm not gay," she said, hoping she wasn't sounding defensive.
With the possible exception of Tony Gilmour,
she thought guiltily.
"I didn't mean that!" He took both of her hands in his and placed them flat against his chest. "It was what I was saying about being a pariah. We're two of a kind."
"You mean, I'm a pariah, too?"
"Well, aren't you?"
8: Qinmeartha the Insane God
If she'd been at her own flat she'd probably have hit the whisky as soon as she got inside the door. Instead, after she'd bathed Ian fed her cocoa. She sat wrapped in an old towelling dressing-gown he'd lent her and looked at the flames jumping in the hearth.
"Thank you," she said. "And I don't just mean for pulling me away from the mob in the church. I think this – the fire, the cocoa – is you saving my life for the second time in a day. Thank you."
"Next time maybe it'll be your turn," he said. He'd poured himself a glass of beer and was sitting to one side of the fireplace. He looked embarrassed.
"I mean it ..." she started.
"I really wish you'd stop," he said. "You'd have done the same for me."
I hope I would have,
she thought,
but I'm not sure I'd have had the courage. They were wilder than the werewolves ...
"What's it like, being gay?"
He laughed. "What's it like being straight?" he said.
"I meant, what's it like being gay in a little dump like Ashburton-by-the-Moor? You said you were a pariah. Cam it really be like that?"
"Oh – easily. It's not just my imagination. I got on well with your aunt, and Greta's always been all right with me. But most of the rest ..." He let the words hang, then added: "Well, you saw them for yourself, today."
"Yes, but that wasn't
really
them. They were ..."
"Oh, it was really them, all right." He stood up and looked for something on the mantelpiece. "Just pray to the gods of your choice that you don't see them as they really are ever again. They're bad enough, a few of them, when they're just the way they hope everybody thinks they are. Ah – got it."
He was holding a joint. "You don't mind, I hope?" he said, suddenly unsure.
"No – go ahead. I don't, myself, much. Dope usually just makes me feel a bit sick."
She finished her cocoa and put the empty mug down by the edge of the hearth, then wrapped her arms around her knees. She was naked under the dressing-gown, and she felt the warmth of the fire directly against the undersides of her thighs. She couldn't recall having felt as contented as this – not since before Aunt Jill's death, at any rate. She wanted to stretch herself out in front of the grate like a cat, and purr.
"Do you have a lover?" she said.
"Not at the moment. There's not much of a choice, locally, is there?"
"No one in Newton? Or Plymouth?"
"No one at all, for a while. There was someone out at Dartington, but he moved to France and I was left behind."
His voice was unhappy.
"No one in Ashburton you sort of fancy?" she said. "I could do with a lover myself. Maybe you've got better taste in men than I have. We could hunt as a pair – you taking the gays and me the straights." She cackled. She liked the idea of this man being a close friend of hers; and she wanted, too, to be his close friend.
"There's one, but he's not interested."
"Who?"
He dragged on the joint, making little sparks in the air.
"I promise I won't tell," she said.
He grinned. "Like being out behind the bike-sheds at the back of the school playground?" he said.
"Exactly. Cross my heart."
"OK, I trust you, Joanna Gard." He leaned forward. "It's Tony Gilmour."
She couldn't say anything for a moment.
He misinterpreted her silence. "Yes, I know he's not even gay, but I can't help the fact that I've fallen in love with him. I saw him one night coming out of the Blue Horse, and we just said `good evening' to each other, the way you do, and that was it for me. I've told myself that ..."
"B-but ..."
"Don't say you fancy him too." Ian was obviously trying to banter, but he wasn't completely able to conceal the bitterness.
"Well, yes. No – I mean, no. It's just that ..."
"Just what?"
"Tony's not ... not male. Not a man. He's – she's a girl, a woman. She's Steve's younger sister. You haven't got the two siblings mixed up, have you?"
He was shaking his head. She put her hand anxiously on his knee, removed it quickly, replaced it.
"Tony's as male as I am," he said. "Yes, he's the younger one. I mean, whatever made you think he was a girl? Tony's a boy's name, not a girl's."
"Antonia. I thought it was short for Antonia."
He took another long toke. "Just like Steve's short for Stephanie," he said.
"Or Stephen."
"But Stephanie in this instance."
"Steve. Tony's older brother?"
"Older sister."
Now Joanna was shaking her head. "There's something terribly wrong here," she said. "There's something wrong with this whole fucking village, and whatever it is has been stopping me from thinking about it too hard. Steve's a man. He's a pompous, self-satisfied, over-bumptious, not terribly bright man. I
know
! I bumped into him once and felt his balls!"
She gulped.
"By accident," she added quickly.
Ian shrugged. "And I've seen her sunbathing in a bikini. There wasn't much bikini. Not enough to ..."
Joanna's mind was racing. If Tony were in fact a man, even though the evidence of her five senses had told her otherwise, then maybe this explained why she'd found herself drawn to ... him. But not entirely. Because her first sight of Steve had likewise made her short of breath. And it was impossible to think of Steve as being a Stephanie – even more impossible than it was to accept that Tony might be an Anthony.
All right, let's not take this seriously for a while. Let's just pretend that it's a silly parlour game, with rules that don't make a whole lot of sense, and keep going along with it until we see what we come out with at the end.
"Maybe they swap sexes backwards and forwards between them," she said slowly.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised," said Ian, so casually that for a moment she thought she'd misheard him.
"What makes you say that?"
"The fact that Tony isn't remotely interested in me is only one of the reasons why my falling in love with him was such a dumb thing to do."
"What else is there?" she said. "Oh, and I think I would like a bit of that joint, please, after all."
"You said it yourself, Joanna Gard." Ian passed her the spliff, holding it neatly between his fingers and thumb. "Something's been going drastically wrong in this village for months now – and nobody's been able to do anything about it. Nobody's even
wanted
to do anything about it. Except me, and I don't count – because I'm a pariah. They've just watched as the people have, one by one, begun to shrink away until finally they die, all watched over by the benign eye of the Reverend James Daker, vicar of St Leonard's, his parish."
"Are you trying to say that the bloody vicar's knocking off his parishioners?"
She began to laugh. Maybe it was the joint getting to her.
Ian smiled, too, but wanly. "No – no, of course I'm not. He's an evil old bastard, but I don't think he's a serial killer. Not a polite sort of a thing to be, if you take my meaning." His mimicry was good enough that she started laughing again. "But he's been watching it happen, and I think that, early on, he could have stopped it if he'd wanted to."
"What started it all off?" Joanna said.
Ian drew a deep breath and reached for the joint. "It started when the Gilmours got here," he said. "They're what began it."
"I ... believe you," said Joanna after a long silence. "There's something ... odd about them."
He hooted. "That's the understatement of the year!"
"What have they done to you?" she said. And then she began to tell him about what had happened with the pack of wolves up on Dartmoor. It all seemed very silly to her, sitting here in front of this chuckling fire, warm in a sensible towelling dressing-gown, and she half-expected him to begin to look at her askance or just to start poking fun at her. But he remained entirely serious throughout her account, listening to her intently. She told him, too, about the conversation she'd had with Steve and Tony when she'd told them all the rotten things that had happened to her – and that she'd done – since Christmas; which meant that she told Ian some of them as well, although she glossed over the fact that the fetus ("The child," he interposed) had really been Mike's, not Peter's. Then she moved on to what had happened at the church this afternoon, before Ian had intervened to save her from the mob.
And finally, before she'd quite realized what she was doing, she told him about the dreams she'd had of the world created by the Insane God Qinmeartha, and of the hopes of the Wardrobe Folk for the coming of the Girl-Child LoChi. And as she told him these last things, which had seemed to her totally disassociated from the rest, she began to wonder if in fact the dreams actually fitted in with what the Gilmours had been doing to her, if they were all part and parcel of the same thing: the completion of the picture. There was a symmetry she'd noted before between the darkness on the moor and the unending light of the Insane God's world; and that symmetry had been extended during her experiences at St Leonard's, when the false darkness had given way to the pulse of searing light. And had events here in Ashburton, since her arrival, been any less insane than those in the world under Qinmeartha's rule?
"That's quite a tale," said Ian when she'd finally come to a halt. The joint had long ago burnt out; he chucked the roach onto the fire, then added some coal on top of it. "It's more than I had in mind. No insane gods or other worlds in my hypothesis."
"Which was?"
"That the Gilmours are vampires. Not tall old men from Transylvanian castles flitting around the countryside in Batman costumes sucking blood from virgins' throats – not Hollywood vampires. I was thinking more of psychic vampires, preying on people's life-forces, sucking them dry of their souls so that they can live themselves forever, eternally young."
"Anyone listening in on this would think we were both equally nuts," said Joanna. The fire didn't seem to be warming her as effectively as before. There were shadows in the corners of the room that she hadn't noticed earlier.
"I don't think we're nuts," said Ian. "I don't think we
can
be nuts, in this situation. It's the circumstances that have gone crazy, and we're very sanely trying to find the least absurd way of explaining them."
"Or, anyway, you are," she corrected. "I don't have any theories, remember?"
"You think that all the rest of the weird things around here tie in with the dreams you've been having," he pointed out. "You were talking about Qinmeartha the Insane God and the Wardrobe Folk as if they were as real as you and me."
"But they
are
as ..." She stopped. "I think they are. Ian, do you think, maybe, that I actually have gone off my trolley?"
"No," he said immediately.
"That's gallant. But ..." She thought for a moment. "This past fortnight, I haven't been acting too rationally. Apart from the fact I've spent most of the time pissed out of my skull, I've been letting everything else go. I mean you didn't see those knickers I had on: I had to flush them away down your loo. (Hope I haven't blocked it.) And ... hell, a lot of the things that've been happening to me, maybe they've
not
been happening, as it were. Maybe it's just been that I've gone not-so-quietly bananas. I've been imagining it all."
"You weren't imagining being attacked by a mob of church-goers," he said. "That is, not unless you're imagining sitting here talking about it with me now."
"That," said Joanna, "is a horrible thought."
"I'm
real
," he said, laughing. He stretched out his hand to her. "Go on – feel it."
She felt the hand, but only because it was there. "I wasn't just making conversation when I was asking you if you think I'm crazy," she said. "I believe that's what the Gilmours have been trying to do with me. I don't know why they'd want to – perhaps they haven't got any real reason, but have just been doing it for fun, or maybe using me as a scapegoat, like the Insane God Qinmeartha is using the Wardrobe Folk as his scapegoat. I can't tell you their motives: all I can say is that maybe that's what's been happening to me."
She paused, expecting him to say something, but he just stared at her in the firelight.
"It's been like trying to walk through glue," she suddenly burst out. "I haven't known what's been really happening to me, and what hasn't! Sometimes I've been certain that I really was beset by werewolves, other times I've thought it was all just a load of garbage, or maybe a dream that I've somehow drunkenly remembered as if it actually happened. I haven't known, one way or the other."
She was crying. In front of anyone else, apart from Aunt Jill – except that Aunt Jill was dead, of course – she'd have felt ashamed of breaking down like this. But Ian just put his hand softly on the back of her neck, comforting her by his touch.
"It may not be much consolation to you to know this," he said, "but I really did see you being assaulted by the mob this afternoon. And I heard what sounded like wolves howling the other night. Faint and distant they were, but that's what it sounded like to me. Coming from the direction of the moor. I think all those things did happen to you, Joanna Gard. I believe you."
He continued to massage her neck.
The phone rang, breaking the spell.
Ian rose, removing his hand gently, and moved off into another room. She could hear him talking urgently to someone, but couldn't make out the words.
"That was Ronnie Gilmour," he said when he came back. His face was white, and he looked as if he were freezing. "He knows that you're up here with me. He was ringing for both of us. He says he's got something to show us – something he says might interest us. Now. Down at the playing fields at the end of Ham's Lane."
"I'm game," Joanna said. "Are you?"
"Better get dressed," Ian said.
~
Dressing in his bedroom, trying to ignore the clammy feel of her jeans against her thighs, she let her eyes run along the spines of the books on his shelves. There was a lot of stuff by Colin Wilson – that was where he must have picked up the notion of psychic vampires – as well as books by other authors with whose names she was less familiar: Stan Gooch, John Gribbin, Jenny Randles ...