Jago (55 page)

‘There there,’ he said, elated, justified, complete.

‘Dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig,’
Jeremy shouted, taking a sharp implement from behind his back and, with a vicious slice, embedding it in Maskell’s chest.

* * *

The alien vegetable had the boy in its grip, but Jeremy stabbed it with his pick. Ferg heard the blade’s thudding chunk, saw the gusher of green sap splash the kid’s face and chest. A roar was born inside the alien and grew, making its entire body reverberate like a giant musical instrument, finally bursting forth from moss-moustached mouth and knothole nostrils. It was a single note, drawn out and echoing. It filled the garden and rose to the skies, to where the invasion fleet must be swarming, locked in an invisible orbit, sensors aimed at Alder.

Jeremy struggled with the invader, trying to tip himself out of its embrace. Paul, there to catch him, fell under the weight of the child, scrabbling away from reaching arms. Ferg dashed forwards to help and pull Jeremy away. They ran along the side of the house, but the alien woman was there on her horse, blocking their path.

Paul stood, and the alien bashed him. The blow didn’t strike properly, or else he’d have been as out of it as Dolar or Salim, but Paul reeled under the wooden fist, and fell on the lawn.

Aliens were all over the place. All kinds of aliens. The Iron Insects had been the spearhead. Syreeta and Jessica were standing back and watching, traitors to the human race egging the invaders on to victory.

Ferg grabbed the horse’s mane. The animal waved its heavy head like a hammer, and jumped its forelegs off the ground. The alien woman, attached parasitically to the horse by suckers on her knees, had her steed under control. She reached and took Ferg’s throat, pulling him off his feet.

The alien woman had him up, side-saddle, before her, and her twiggy fingers grew around him. He clawed her arm, shredding green and brown layers. She smiled, horribly beautiful, skin the colour of a cooking apple, fine antennae wisping up from her eyebrows into her hair. Her golden eyes shone, alive with liquid intelligence. The horse couldn’t support three weights, and sank to its knees. Ferg picked a finger away from his throat, and it snapped like a carrot. The alien woman sang pain, and he was dropped.

There was an alien child too, covered in cactus spines, hair a tussle of pampas grass. The creature was grappling with Jeremy, pressing him to the ground, pummelling him. Ferg felt a slamming force between his shoulders, and knew the alien woman had brought him down. It was no use. They were here, and they were taking over.

* * *

Hannah was on top, scratching with point-ended fingers, calling him names, trying to get past his hands to his face. Her fingers had become long, sharp pencils, and she stabbed the backs of his hands with them, wanting to get at his eyes. Daddy always warned Hannah about her pencils, saying she’d have someone’s eye out one day.

‘Jesus makes us shine with a clear, pure light,’ Hannah sang, ‘like a little candle burning in the night…’

The Evil Dwarf had been easy. He wasn’t actual. But Jeremy’s sister would never give up, never go away. Sisters didn’t. She’d sworn a pact with Lisa Steyning to get revenge for the time he’d told on them when they set fire to newspapers in the barn. With terrible sisterly cruelty, she’d bided her time, plotting. Now she’d have her revenge.

‘…in this world of darkness, you and me must shine…’

Hands over his eyes, he felt pencil leads stabbing. Mummy and Daddy made strange noises; everyone else shouted and screamed.

‘…you in your small corner, and I in mine.’

Hannah got a good grip on one of his wrists and wrenched hard. His hand came away, and he saw with one eye. His sister smiled down at him, pretty flowers in her hair, sharp chips of wood for her teeth, a thin beard of spines around her throat.

‘Gotcha!’ she said.

* * *

Paul tried to get up, but his tooth wouldn’t let him. It had come alive when the Green Man hit him, and now seemed to be a quarter of the size of his body, a solid lump of disabling agony. It hurt like hell, no matter what he did; if he moved, if he tried to stand, the pain multiplied tenfold. The tooth was bigger than his head, weighing him down like a cartoon anvil, a million ants eating away inside the enamel, acid delicately scraping out the nerve. He pressed the ground with his hands, and screamed as the throb expanded. The pain got worse as he stood, but he climbed over it, shutting the explosion behind closed eyes. Weak, he sagged against the wall of the house, and let his eyes fall open.

The Green Man stood tall, hand-tipped branches stretching. As the pain burst inside his mouth, Paul saw the face of the farmer inside the wooden cocoon. He was the puzzled, buried and forgotten seed that had sprouted the monster, bleeding from the pick stuck into his chest. A moment of complete darkness, with the man screaming inside it, it passed, the Green Man instantly growing and reforming over him. Paul realized he knew the man inside the greenery. Maskell had come to the Pottery to replace a Mike Bleach coffee cup, one of a set, that had been broken. He was offhand and squirearchical, but his wife had been pleasant.

That pretty woman, in dark glasses with a navel-revealing tied blouse, was the horseback huntress now, Paul realized. Jeremy and the junior monster grappling with him were their children.

‘Maskell,’ he said, trying to reach through the shell.

The Green Man ignored him, continuing his yell. There was a scrum in the garden, with Jeremy underneath his transformed sister, and Ferg underneath the boy’s mother, all four of them scrambled together. The horse that had hooved Salim down stood by, easing up from its knees. Paul bit on his tooth and dark truth flooded back for a moment. Pain cut through the illusion like a knife. He saw the troubled farmer, lost in himself, blood in his chest hair, clothes gone in tatters.

He ran past the Green Man and hauled Jeremy out from under everyone. The girl scratched his hands, but he kicked her away. The Green Woman stood up, pushing Ferg aside, and her daughter ran to her, arms twining around her waist. They looked at each other, each with a child clinging to them, spies contemplating an exchange of hostages. He wasn’t giving Jeremy up. He’d yielded too much ground. It was time to win something back.

‘Sue-Clare?’ he said, hoping he remembered her name right.

He had. The Green Woman wrinkled her brow, arrow-lines appearing around her widow’s peak. Her eyes were unreadable nuts of pure gold. Paul bit again, and saw for a moment the streaked, dirty face of the woman he remembered. She wasn’t as far gone as her husband.

‘You don’t have to be like this.’

The Green Woman straightened up, daughter still clinging, and looked to Maskell. She moved with birdlike grace, turning her head with each slight change of eyeline, shifting back her shoulders when she lifted her hands. A golden tear dripped down her cheek.

* * *

Mummy had gone funny, but Jeremy was still scared of her. Daddy had changed her. She wasn’t all right yet. Daddy wanted to get him, even more than the Evil Dwarf had wanted to get him. Daddy didn’t want to eat his brain, but to make Jeremy like him. Once, he’d heard Daddy tell Mummy, ‘Thank God I didn’t grow up like my father.’ Jeremy remembered Grandpa as a strict old man with a white moustache, who insisted on polished shoes and done-up top buttons. Daddy wasn’t like that. It was only fair, if Daddy hadn’t had to be like his father, that Jeremy not have to be like Daddy. He hid behind Paul.

* * *

It was time to end this. Maskell heaved his chest, forcing out the spike stuck into it, and spat the tool away. The mouthlike wound closed as soon as the thing was gone. His women were letting him down, and he would have to step in. It would be painful, but a lesson would be learned. In the end, everyone would be in their place. His knees straining and creaking, he stumped towards his son. The normal man turned, and Jeremy darted behind him again, his back to Sue-Clare. They had Jeremy and the normal man pinned down between them.

‘No supper, ever,’ Maskell said.

The strength of the land filled him. He only needed his family about him to be complete.

‘No videos, no books, no comics.’

The normal man was weak, incomplete. He wouldn’t fight.

‘No sleeping with Jethro, no pocket money.’

Hannah was a good girl, like her mother. She did as he said, and always took her quirting when she stepped out of her place. Jeremy was a troublemaking child, always refusing to do what was best.

The punk was standing next to the normal man, Jeremy in the middle. One or the other would do as an example. Maskell was a farmer. He raised crops, and cut them down. Giving death was as much a part of what he did as giving life. He’d sown his seed; now was the time to reap his harvest, to separate wheat from chaff.

Chaff was kids with silly haircuts and torn clothes, snarly faces and scarred knuckles. Kids who knew their place, but never stayed in it. Kids from the cities who poured into the village and shat over the land.

Maskell stood over the three and put his hands on them, pushing the normal man and the punk aside like curtains. He raised a foot and pressed Jeremy down with it, crushing his son to the earth. Jeremy screamed and struggled, but was held fast in his loving father’s grasp.

‘Now, Jerm,’ Maskell said, hand growing around the punk, ‘for a lesson. This is what happens to people who don’t know their place, to people who don’t respect the land.’

His hand had grown completely around the boy’s head, leaving slitlike interstices for eyes, nose and mouth. The absurd coxcomb of red hair jutted out through the top of Maskell’s fist. The normal man backed away, Sue-Clare’s slender and sinewy arms wrapped around him to keep him out of this. The boy screamed, eyes wide. Maskell joined voice with the boy, taking up the scream, turning it into a yell of triumph, calling to the earth to accept sacrifice. Strength flowed down his arm, filling the cage his hand had become. Tubers twined around his head-sized fist, covering the boy’s eyes and mouth, leaves swarming thickly. The leaves puffed out where the boy was screaming. Tubers probed the boy’s skin, but didn’t dig in, didn’t burrow. They crept along close to the face, feelers spreading out to make a flesh-and-wood mask that enclosed the boy’s head perfectly.

‘Don’t!’ shouted the normal man.

Outsiders were a menace, deadly as a blight, destroying crops and livestock. Danny Keough had been right about that. Each year, more and more outsiders poured into the village, spreading polluting shit, corrosive foolishness. It was only proper that an outsider feed the earth, help repair the damage done through the years.

He held a complete life in his hand, and knew that was actual power, the power of life and death. Maskell’s hand grew tight, and his grip began to constrict.

A
lthough the glass panels at either side were blown, the great door of the Agapemone was still locked, and Taine would have the keys. Fuck this for a game of toy soldiers, Susan thought, jamming her forefinger into the large keyhole, working the tumblers with a
push.
She overdid it, and pulled her fingers away quickly, avoiding the slow explosion of broken metal and wood that burst from the lock. Might as well finish the job, she thought, popping the hingepins and butting her head towards the door. It fell outwards and tobogganed down the steps. Cooler night air swept around her, and she felt a release from the pressure cooker of the Manor House. Jago was about unconsciously to expel her from his sphere of influence, a whale shrugging off a pilot fish. That suited her fine, and she felt the mindwind build up behind her, riffling her clothes against her back, streaming her hair around her cheeks.

The garden of the Agapemone was pandemonium. Splits had opened in the earth and disgorged implike clouds of flies. The insects swarmed among the people, clustering on bodies like parasitical growths. Some were suffering the torments of the damned, some experienced the raptures of the blessed. Close to the house, Jago’s fantasies were the strongest, the most dangerous. Things were moving like moles under the ground.

She turned back to the hallway. Karen stood by the stairs, staring at her and seeing a fallen angel. Earlier, the girl had doubted Jago, but Susan’s little display of third-degree psychokinesis and children’s-party prestidigitation had tipped her back towards belief in Beloved. Nobody loves you when you’re a witch.

‘Coming?’ Susan asked. ‘Going?’

‘Staying,’ the Sister said.

‘Your choice, Karen.’

‘Share Love.’

Susan shrugged. ‘Look after yourself.’

Walking away, Susan had to fight the compulsion to break into a jog, then a run. Then to hurl herself blindly into the night, until she collapsed from exhaustion, as far as possible away from Jago. What the Brethren had been saying was true. These were the Last Days, the cork was about to pop. The whole golden dream would go up in flames and either self-destruct or spread itself across the face of the earth.

The garden pond was a stretch of glittering crystal. A girl Susan had never seen was lying by it, staring at her broken reflection, stroking the surface, tearing her hands on jagged edges. Ribbons of blood rolled along faults, clustering about the crushed pondweed. There was someone under the pond, trapped with the goldfish, one hand stuck out like that of the Lady in the Lake, fingers waving, sometimes making a straining fist.

These were isolated cases, surrounded and outweighed by the tired, stoned, crazed and forgotten hordes. Many were sprawled asleep under blankets or sleeping bags, or stretched out, exchanging dope-fuelled rambles. Beside the noise of their conversation and the various muted strains of self-made music, she was picking up a whisper of mental static that washed around in her head, tickling away at her permanent migraine.

She picked her way between bodies. No one had been hurt here, but she sensed pain in the village, black spots she knew meant death.

A group of kids were chasing a ball of blue flame around the flower beds, sometimes catching it and tossing it like a frisbee. One of them had an ass’s tail dangling from a split in his jeans, and donkey ears.