Harvest (53 page)

Further off from this maelstrom, people came out of houses to find out what the roaring and shaking was. Those nearest who could see the horror turned and tried to escape. Those further off,
their view obscured by their neighbours’ houses, made the mistake of coming forward.

As for the bridge, it lurched too and the people staring down began to fall forward, helpless to stop themselves, their cars sliding after them into the water.

The column was now clogged up with mud and trees, cars and people, and it rose higher still as, all around it, dust shot into the air to the sound of small explosions. The sun, briefly bright,
became muted, the sky angry grey. As for the sinkhole, it spread ever wider, sucking all that was in its path straight down.

Then the church itself tilted and sank towards the hole, breaking free of the tower at its eastern end, the roof and walls falling away to reveal rows of pews, someone clutching at a Norman
column, the top half of someone else’s body protruding from fallen stones, a scream on their faces. Then all that dropped away into the darkness, drenched by filthy water filled with things
as they went, before being overwhelmed and lost.

The day was overtaken by a cracking, roaring, ripping violence of sound beneath which, like disharmonious bass notes to a terrible tune, came roars and subterranean rumblings.

All the time, the people on the far outer edge of these events who could hear but not properly see made the mistake of walking towards the void and falling or being sucked suddenly to their own
frightening deaths.

Further north, another column of water shot into the sky; the ground ripped open and a secondary sinkhole appeared where the bridge had been and was no more. It widened and for a brief moment a
man and his wife were caught between the two, facing an impossible choice. They each ran, in opposite directions, and then their ground was gone and they plunged down into chaos, the crushing,
suffocating, darkness of a liquid mud filled with the dying, the dead and all the inanimate objects between.

The crystalline dust that rose up from the ruins of the houses billowed higher still, clear of the dirt and catching the dark light. Below the maelstrom of tumbling, breaking, falling, imploding
cottages and cars, people and dust, asphalt and vegetation, everything turned and sank, boiled and frothed like the rolling boil of jam in a preserving pan.

The huge void looked like the maw of a great beast whose solitary fang was the spire of the church, rocking back and forth but held in place by the rock on which it had originally been built,
like the last incisor poking from a filthy jaw bone.

Half Steeple seemed almost nothing now but its own spire.

It became too hard for Jack, Katherine and Stort to watch, too terrible, utterly incomprehensible. One by one they turned away, as if to look was to do a shaming thing.

Yet further off, across the landscape beyond Half Steeple, the sun was out. A train moved across the horizon, cars along roads, an aeroplane in the sky.

For Stort and the others, time had ceased to be, as initial shock was replaced by a kind of drifting wonder at what they were reluctant witnesses to.

Stort had glanced at his chronometer when the trouble began, but when he did so again, assuming that ten or fifteen minutes had passed, he saw that it was little more than seconds, a minute
perhaps, no more than two. What had happened was so shocking, so vast in its scale, so bewildering, that words failed them all. So, at first, did any notion of taking action. There was nothing they
could do, together or separately. Nothing anyone could do.

Half Steeple and its people were in the grip of Mother Earth. She, who had given them life and abundance for so many centuries and millennia, was calling in her debt and taking back her own.

Now, wherever they looked, disaster and tragedy were in the making. To the north, coming down the Malvern road, a silver-grey vehicle sped towards what was now a vast hole in the ground in which
the remnants of the village were violently stirred about by an unseen hand.

It reached a roundabout as, weirdly, the garage that was there exploded in a ball of flames and black smoke, which prompted the driver to put his foot down and accelerate ever faster to his
doom, thinking he was escaping it. His vehicle began to swerve from side to side on a road whose camber had begun to shift, until, too late, the road steepened, broke up and took him and his car
into the swirling stew.

To their far left, almost behind them, a flash of colour appeared along the same road from the opposite direction, red and yellow. It was a racing cyclist, then another, then two more.

‘No!’ screamed Katherine. ‘
No
. . .’

They were too far off to hear and if they saw the rising dust and smoke and plumes of water ahead, they did not show it, their heads down, their feet pumping at their pedals. They rounded a
corner, the leader sat up, puzzled by the shaking in the road perhaps, but it was too late.

He tried to stop, turning sideways to the way he was going, right foot on the road, but the ones behind crashed into him and as the road fell away suddenly, they too were all gone into the void,
the wheels of their bikes turning slowly as they went.

Then things stilled and silence of a kind fell. Birds and wildfowl, which had first fled in panic and then come back, circled the village high up, in and out of the vast
billowing cloud of dust, their bearings lost and their sense of purpose all gone, dark against the sky, like the ashes of burnt paper above a fire.

The air thickened and grew acrid, a slight breeze brought dust over the hill and into their faces. They coughed and turned, stumbling into the wood behind them, eyes streaming, faces drained of
colour, words failing in their mouths.

‘Stort,’ began Jack, ‘Stort . . . ?’

Stort sat on the wood floor, his weight against a tree, eyes down, head shaking, as shocked as his friends.

‘It isn’t over,’ he said, ‘there’s something worse coming.’

The wood darkened and they saw that the drifting dust cloud had obscured the sun, casting a pall of twilight and sudden cold over where Half Steeple had been.

‘There must be survivors,’ said Jack, staring to the edge of the wood again.

‘There may be,’ said Katherine, ‘but there are some who do not understand what’s happened or that there is still great danger.’

She pointed to people who were approaching the village along roads and lanes from all directions, alerted by the dust and rumbling Earth, some in cars, some running, some walking from farms and
houses towards the edge of the destruction.

‘We stay where we are,’ said Jack firmly. ‘Go down there and we go to our deaths.’

The others agreed.

He was right and so was Stort; it wasn’t over.

The Earth shook again and began to roar and rumble. The edges of the void rose up in a vast circle, a vile raised hole, like something organic, filthy, ulcer-like. The lips of this foul thing
pouted horribly and then began to close in towards themselves, a mouth closing.

It narrowed, it moved inward, the hole began simply to disappear. Until what teetered on the edge of the darkness were whole houses, stretches of unbroken grass and the church tower with its
twisted steeple around which the mouth was closing.

The tower began to sink into the ground.

Down it went, grass and rubble all around and an occasional gravestone that had survived the sinking earlier.

Down like a sinking ship at sea, upended, clinging on, then shooting down into oblivion. First the tower then the steeple, a third, a bit more, a half, and then . . . it stopped.

Dead, as if it had hit solid rock.

Still.

Vertical once more, but half gone.

Half Steeple was gone, but a half steeple remained.

Stort shook his head in wonderment.

Katherine wanted to weep but her shock was too deep and she could not.

Jack said, ‘We had better see if there’s anything we can do.’

But his words came out thick as if covered in dust, without purpose or intent. Before such monstrosity there was nothing mortal kind could do.

Arnold said, ‘My boat’s gone. Stay here, there’s some down there.’

He set off before stopping and looking back.

‘I’ll get you all away,’ he said, ‘south-westward like Mister Stort says. Where you better find that gem and give it up to her who did this!’

‘Who was that?’ asked Jack.

‘Her!’ said Arnold, setting of at speed down the hill. ‘
Her!
’

It was hard to see what he meant, for it was dark by the river and dust swirled about confusingly.

They couldn’t see much.

Just dogs and riders on them and the form of a woman, bent and broken, weeping and wending across the wild waters there. It was Judith the Shield Maiden.

She cast not a single glance towards where Stort stood, but he did at her. Then the dust swirled and fell and she was gone, cursing as she went, and the dogs with her.

‘The end of days has begun,’ said Stort.

Arnold waved from far below.

He had found a boat drifting, a big clinker-built thing, which he swung with the flow to the shore.

He raised an arm and Stort raised one back.

‘We’re leaving,’ he said, ‘all of us together. Rough the water may be but who can trust our Mother Earth after what we have been witness to? Agreed, Jack?
Everybody?’

‘Agreed,’ they said one by one, the risk seeming as great whatever they did. But they were all together now and on their way south and west to fulfil a quest that might be the only
thing protecting all life itself from the end of days.

S
tort now knew where they were going, but so did others too. Quatremayne knew.

My Lord Sinistral knew.

Leetha as well.

And Borkum Riff.

Katherine had a vague idea. When they first stood on the bank of the Severn discussing which way to go, didn’t she turn south-westward as if hearing a song to her heart? She did.

But she let it go and turned with Stort and Jack and left it behind when they went the wrong way.

Did Jack know where they were going, even now? He knew what he wanted but not how to get there. He’d fight for them all, right to the death, but he couldn’t hear
musica
to
save his soul.

So Jack didn’t know but maybe he would.

As for Arthur, he didn’t know where to find the gem.

But Quatremayne did because Bedwyn Stort let his paper drop in the Main Square when he ran for his life and later they found his notes in the stacks.

What took him months took them a few minutes. The name of the place matched that on the brass in the Square; its position, give or take, was that of the small broken piece of russet glass set
fast in the cobbles.

‘I think,’ said Quatremayne, his smooth cheeks perspiring and his eyes as shiny as grease, ‘that we may now say, gentlemen, that the secret is out. The gem of Autumn is in or
near a place called Veryan. Since we may safely say that Brum is secure, but for a few insurgents, then we have time to turn our attention to the gem. Why should we bother? Because I can think of
no quicker or easier way to secure our position in the hearts and minds of the absent citizens of this city, and lure them back so that we can get it up and running once more, than for us to be
seen to bring the gem back to its home. Can you?’

They were on the steps of the Residence once more; the city had now been occupied without incident for several days. Its citizens were nowhere to be seen except in suburbs so widespread that
they were impossible to hunt down.

‘True,’ he pronounced, ‘there are some minor irritations . . .’

He said it coolly but he did not fool his new officers.

He was referring to the image that kept appearing overnight in different places all over the city, in every location imaginable: two orbs linked by a half-hoop.

Blut’s spectacles.

Usually drawn in chalk.

The worst example was right there across the front elevation of the Library opposite the Residence.

Quatremayne had been forced to look at this huge image of Blut
in absentia
every time he sat at his desk in the building, so he had moved his seat. Then, when he exited by the front
entrance, there it was. He was not a hydden to enjoy being pushed into a corner by an image, least of all one that screamed ‘Blut!’.

He did not understand it.

Was it a joke?

Whatever it was, it ate away at him.

He said, ‘Where is he? That professor whatever his name?’

‘Foale, sir.’

‘Well, where is the old fool?’ he said without respect.

Even they were shocked by Quatremayne. Blut was under his skin and that made him mad.

‘Inside,’ one of them said, reluctantly. They had better things to do than waste time.

‘Bring him here, where Blut’s spectacles can see.’

The spectacles gazed impassively across the Square as Arthur Foale was pulled out of the Residence, hands wired tight behind his back, and dropped at Quatremayne’s feet.

‘Watch this,’ said the General, smiling, his minions tittering, ‘watch this, Blut.’

He kicked Arthur in the face not once but twice and broke his nose.

He kicked him in the gut.

‘Can you see, Blut? You cowardly shit you jumped-up . . .’

He kicked Arthur in the mouth and a tooth burst his lip.

And Arthur, in terrible pain and fear, knowing Margaret was dead, called out to the living to help him now.

Jack . . .

Katherine . . .

. . . and you Judith, who knew such pain, you’d know what to do.

‘It’s enough, sir. “Blut” gets the point.’

The General, after he recovered his humour a little, and breathed more slowly, said, ‘We may also say, gentlemen, that Blut is alive, and I am reasonably certain that I
know where he will be in forty-eight hours’ time, on the last night of October, the eve of Samhain. He will be with his friends.’

His minions nodded.