Jago (53 page)

Erskine giggled. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

‘No,’ Draper continued, ‘there’s much worse than murderers. Most murderers you can talk to, have a drink with, go down the dogs with. Murder is an understandable crime. Everybody wants to kill somebody some time.’

Teddy told himself he wouldn’t beg for mercy. Draper finished his fag and stubbed it out on Teddy’s shoulder. It didn’t even hurt much.

‘No, if you’re talking scum of the earth, you’re talking drugs.’

Erskine agreed, nodding.

‘Yeah, drugs. That’s the worst, Barry. Slimy little shits injecting ten-year-olds with heroin, passing round the crack in kindergarten playgrounds…’

Draper took Teddy’s shirt collar, and arranged it properly. Then he pulled hard, ripping his shirt open, scattering buttons.

‘Search him for drugs, Barry.’

Erskine saluted, and picked up the chair, sliding Teddy off it. He found his feet and hands together, cuffs clattering, and he was dragged along the groundsheet. From this position, he saw the bundle under a canvas sheet, dragged to one side. A pale human arm, ringed with bangles, stuck out. Erskine lifted up the canvas to give Teddy a look, disclosing a couple of boys, throats open and black, bunched together and stacked ready for disposal.

‘And here are some I prepared earlier,’ Erskine said.

Raine pulled Teddy’s body over, making him face upwards.

‘Get his belt off and his jeans down, Chocky,’ Erskine said. Erskine handed the constable a pair of polythene gloves.

Raine struggled with Teddy’s belt, and loosened his trousers. It was difficult, with the chair and the handcuffs, but Raine did his job. Teddy thought this was the lowest it had ever been. Worse than when he was a kid and he’d been spanked on his bare bottom in front of Jenny. He didn’t care any more. They couldn’t do anything more to him.

‘Fuck off,’ he said.

Erskine laughed and tugged at the chair, flipping him over, pushing his face to the groundsheet. ‘Wrong attitude, Edward. Spread your cheeks now, and don’t let out a fart or I’ll be giving you a whopper enema.’

Teddy wouldn’t have believed there was more pain coming. But this hurt like nothing else. He felt invaded, violated, split apart. Erskine took his time, and was casual about it, rooting around.

‘Nothing up here, sarge. Except his brains.’

The policemen laughed. Even Raine.

‘The drugs must be on him somewhere,’ Draper said, ‘or inside him. Sometimes they try to get through by stuffing the drugs into tied condoms and swallowing them. He could have a gutful of cocaine.’

‘You want me to search his stomach?’

Raine struggled with the chair and Teddy and Teddy’s clothes, rearranging all three into an upright position. Teddy was bleeding from a lot of cuts. He might have had a couple of broken bones, but he was hurting too much to notice.

‘I could make the bastard puke,’ Erskine suggested, ‘and we could sort through what comes up.’

Draper shook his head. ‘Just cut him open.’

Erskine delved into a cardboard box, and came up with a serrated Rambo knife.

‘We confiscated this from a satisfied customer,’ he explained. ‘Useful little tool. Not up to the whopper, but it’ll do the job.’

Erskine grabbed the back of Teddy’s hair, and pricked his stomach with the point of the knife. Swastikas were erupting all over his chest like zits. They dripped down from his ears, swarming around his neck, showing up raw on his scalp through the blond fuzz of his cropped hair.

‘Barry,’ said Raine, speaking for the first time, ‘I wouldn’t…’

Erskine stopped before he thrust, and relaxed his grip, easing away from Teddy. He spread his arms, but didn’t drop the knife.

‘That’s right, Barry,’ said a new voice. ‘I wouldn’t.’

W
hatever had run through the village had passed for the moment, leaving creepy calm in its wake. People were standing around, some crying, some stifling hysterical laughter. There were dying fires. Despite the aftermath feel, Paul wasn’t convinced the panic was over. This wasn’t all that different from the usual hour after a Loud Shit concert. The only thing was that the skunk band weren’t due for days. Above, a helicopter circled, lights winking in the sky, blades beating. That made him feel like a specimen under a microscope, observed to see how quickly hostile bacteria would consume him.

Jessica and Syreeta were helping Dolar stand up. The folk singer, not taking much notice of his shotgun wound, still smiled peace at everyone. Ferg was quiet, alert, looking up at the sky.

‘They’re up there,’ he said. ‘The Iron Insects.’

Paul knew what he meant, but wasn’t sure he was right. He thought the Martian war machine had been a nonrecurring phenomenon, a Sunday-for-one-day-only anomaly. Tonight’s monsters would be a different species.

‘Someone’s up there,’ he agreed.

The crowd began to talk to itself. Rumours ran around, trying to explain the collective madness. They were at war, under attack, in a riot, in a dream. Paul was as bewildered as everyone else, but less surprised. Everyone else was catching up with what he’d realized as soon as the war machine stepped out of the trees.

They weren’t in Kansas any more.

He had found Ferg, confirmed the evidence of his senses. But that meant little now. Everyone else was seeing things. Different things.

They’d been walking for minutes, apparently without intending to. Paul realized he was going back to the Pottery, the others following him. It was as good a place as any, he supposed. Hazel was locked up tight in the Agapemone, and nothing he could do would secure her release until she was ready to come out or Jago was ready to let her free. Just now, he could not even remember her normal face; he either saw the blank stranger he’d glimpsed in the chapel, or got her mixed up with her sister, imagining Patch’s huge glasses blotting out Hazel’s distinctive eyes.

People got out of their way. Dolar was trying to get loose of his supporters, but was not steady enough on his feet to keep going without them. Paul guessed Salim, the Asian kid, was quietly going crazy, meditating himself into nothingness to avoid what was going on outside his skull. Ferg, a natural paranoid, was looking around, barely suppressing excitement, seeing invaders in every shadow. Somehow, this group had latched on to him and elected him leader. Ferg was top sergeant, the rest cannon fodder. He didn’t know what to do with them, any more than he knew what to do with himself. The only person he’d met today who had any apparent idea what was going on was Susan, and she was back in the Manor House with Jago’s Brethren, refusing to stick her neck out. These were hard times indeed if he could think of a woman he first met while she was overdosing as a beacon of common sense.

There was a burned-out car in the road. The asphalt was thick with bodies. From the groaning and crying, Paul assumed they were all hurt or drunk, but he saw unmoving lumps among them and realized—with a queerly detached shock—they were the dead. The corpses looked like people lying down. He’d never seen a dead person before, and they were less of a jolt than the war machine or Bike Boy Ben. He’d always admitted the dead were a part of the world, laid out in rows on the news as a foreign correspondent covered the latest atrocity. Now the atrocity was underfoot.

If the shotgun man had been less hysterical, Paul might have seen Dolar get his head blown off in close-up. Wouldn’t that have been a first?

‘Unprecedented,’ he murmured.

Ferg’s ears pricked up, expecting words of wisdom from a fearless leader, but Paul had nothing more to say.

One of the wounded coughed black stuff and shook, turning into one of the dead.

‘What happened?’ Jessica asked. No one had an answer.

There were dead people at the sides of the roads, without an obvious mark on them, lives squeezed out in the crush. At least Hazel had been saved from that. Where she was, she was safe from blind fate, even if she could be subject, in his imagination, to calculated malice.

Outside the Pottery, Paul found the child he had spoken to earlier. He was dirtied and drained, sitting on the verge. Another recruit, Paul thought. The boy was clutching a small tool, like a miner’s pick.

‘Jeremy?’

The kid recognized him, but didn’t have the strength to change his dull expression.

‘Come inside,’ he said, including Jeremy. ‘At least we can get washed. Have a coffee.’

Stepping through the gate, which had been opened, was like walking away from a battlefield. Paul had wondered if the rioters would swarm through all the houses, breaking crockery, looting, smashing furniture. But the Pottery was left alone. He turned on the lights in the showroom and saw undisturbed tables and shelves, pots gleaming, slightly dusty, in order, prices marked. The lawn was rutted from last night, and his desk still stood in the middle of the grass, abandoned.

‘Find some clothes for the kid to wear,’ Paul told Ferg, ‘and get him to take a shower. He smells like he’s had an accident.’

Ferg looked a question.

‘He’s okay, he’s one of us.’

The boy was satisfied. Paul reminded himself that, although Ferg was paying attention to him, that didn’t mean the mohican was any less loony than the rest.

‘The bathroom’s on the landing, first door opposite the stairs’

Ferg took Jeremy inside, and more lights came on in the house. Syreeta and Jessica sat Dolar down on an old wicker chair on the verandah, and he started to feel his wound, ouching profusely. Paul saw Hazel’s wasp trap was clogged like an insect Black Hole of Calcutta.

He went into the hall, and heard the shower running upstairs.

‘There’s a T-shirt up here that’ll fit the kid,’ Ferg shouted down, ‘and a pair of shorts that could be belted on to him.’

Paul picked up the telephone, not even knowing whom to call, and heard nothing in the earpiece. He rattled the receiver and tried again. Nothing. So much for outside help. A noise as big as Alder made must be noticed. The fire brigade would be back, and police, ambulances, media.

‘We sit tight and wait for the locksmith.’

Out the window, he saw Syreeta bending over Dolar, unpicking his shirt from his shallow wound. He looked up the hill, at the spot where the Martian war machine had appeared. Trees stood unwaving on the horizon. He wondered if all this were a curse that befell those who got too wrapped up with petty problems. Too worried about your thesis, your toothache, your girlfriend? Well, try worrying about
this…

Salim sat cross-legged at the edge of the verandah, staring out at the garden. Paul stepped through the back door and watched Syreeta work. She was taking tiny chunks of shot out of Dolar’s shoulder with her fingernails, and he was sucking in breaths with each plucked fragment. In the bathroom upstairs, there was a pair of tweezers he should get for her.

There was a commotion off around the side of the house, and he felt the ground shaking again. He realized, a paralysing twinge shooting from his tooth, that hed fouled up as a field commander and forgotten to shut the front gate.

Salim stood up on the steps of the verandah, and half turned. Paul just had enough time to identify the noise as hoofbeats before a horse, weighed down by a rider, careered around the house into the garden and reared up, hooves fully a foot above Salim’s head. The animal, its rider clinging, breathed steam and kicked the air. Salim caught a blow with his head, and staggered against the wall. Paul tried to hold Salim up, but missed getting a hold on him. The boy, a red dent in his face, tumbled down, legs kicking. The horse’s forelegs clumped down, raising divots from the lawn, and foam fell from its mouth. Paul saw the rider was a woman, hair matted with twigs and flowers, skin greenish in the odd light, unripe-apple breasts bare, eyes golden lamps. A little girl clung to her from behind. The green woman was riding bareback and without reins, wearing only the last of a pair of jeans, barbed knees lodged in the horse’s flank, hands twisted in the animal’s mane. She wasn’t a natural thing.

Jessica was screaming, hands stuffed into her mouth. Salim stopped kicking, dent in his head filled with greyish stuff. His eyes rolled up and showed only white. Only their twitching suggested he was alive.

The horsewoman brought her animal under control and patted it. Paul saw her fingers were too long and triple jointed. Her face was a thin triangle, with a pointed chin and stretched cheeks, a thick widow’s peak V-ing into her forehead. She looked like a large, angry wood nymph, or Herne the Hunter’s nagging wife.

Ferg was behind Paul in the door.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘Too right,’ Paul echoed.

‘Jerm,’ boomed a voice that sounded out as if through a giant bassoon. ‘Jerm!’

The kid was there, too, a shrunken adult in floppy Hazel clothes, clinging to Ferg’s legs.

Jerm? Jeremy?

Something large and unwieldy came around the house and shambled towards the verandah. The horsewoman pulled her animal’s mane, and they stepped back a few yards to make room for the thing.

‘Jerm, Jerm, Swallowing Sperm.’

The Green Man was as tall as his wife on her horse, and twice as broad.

‘Jesus fuck!’ Ferg said.

The Green Man stretched his branchy arms, foliage rustling, and roared out rage, his chest-bark splitting as his lungs expanded, dark-green sap trickling. Ripe ears of corn grew under his arms like plague buboes. His groin was thickly leafed, a greenwood spear jutting out of the vegetation. Cactus spines and potato eyes dotted his calves, tentacles waved from his head, dripping slime. He looked like the illegitimate offspring of the Jolly Green Giant and a
Dr Who
rubber-suit monster.

‘Daddy’s here,’ the Green Man shouted, and Jeremy trembled, one arm around Ferg, the other around Paul.

‘Don’t let Daddy hurt me,’ the child begged. ‘Please, please…’

Paul did not know if he had enough grit to face this, to see it through. The Green Man’s penis bent like a homing aerial, then pointed straight at Jeremy’s head. It swelled, green veins thickening.

‘Far out, man,’ Dolar said, standing up, stepping off the verandah. ‘Look at all the leaves and flowers…’

The folk singer stood next to the Green Man, tentatively extending a hand to touch his vine-covered side.