Jago (61 page)

His gaze drawn back to the light, he saw things moving inside, and was sure they were people. A human-shaped ragged shadow was thrust out beyond the hanging brickery and crumpled into a wastepaper twist that flared for an instant and was consumed.

Hazel?

She was inside the Agapemone somewhere. He had to try to get her out before the light filled the whole of the Manor House. There were people alive inside the light, but he knew it was unhealthy, knew it held threats worse than death. Ears recovered from the boom, he heard music. It was coming out of the spreading sphere. Massed trumpets and an angelic choir.

An ogre with a broad red face and a derby hat sauntered out of the pub, fixed his ugly eye on Paul, and, in an Irish accent, asked, ‘What’s creamy an’ shoots out o’ de clouds?’

Tendrils of white flame burst from the light and trailed streamers over the village, falling in ropes to the ground. The ogre was gone, but his answer rang in Paul’s ears. De Coming o’ de Lord.

The noise grew, a choral symphony. Light and dark shapes danced in the air around the Agapemone.

‘Paul,’ came a woman’s voice, fighting through the trumpets.

He looked. It was Susan, with a few others. They were party-poopers too, not going along with whatever was overcoming the multitude.

‘Hazel,’ he said, ‘what happened to her? Is she safe?’

Susan bit her lip and spread her hands. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t get her out.’

‘What…?’

‘She was all right last time I saw her,’ Susan said, answering his unasked question. ‘Alive, at least.’

Susan’s sidekicks eased into the garden of the pub. There was shelter there. Susan pulled Paul, and he followed them. Plastic kids’ toys had melted into primary-coloured pools on the grass. Out of the direct sightline of the Agapemone, they were away from the crowds. Beyond the garden wall, villagers, festival-goers and passers-by all stood in ranks, looking upwards, faces shining with reflected light. Those with glasses threw back twin glints painful to see.

‘James Lytton,’ said the fit-looking man with a gun in his waistband, extending his hand.

Paul shook it.

‘And this is Teddy.’ It was one of the locals—face a thinner, cleaner version of Allison’s thug friend—and he was limping, half supported by Lytton, obviously battered. His mind had taken a bruising, too, Paul could tell.

‘What’s happening to them?’ Paul asked, indicating the staring crowd. ‘And why are we immune?’

‘It’s partly being prepared in your mind,’ said Susan, ‘and it’s partly pain.’

‘Pain?’ Paul winced.

Susan nodded. ‘You can’t think when you’re in pain, and you need to think to be taken in by all this.’

‘All this what?’

The woman shrugged. ‘All this crap, Paul. Jago’s mind-crap, that’s what’s coming down.’

The crowds moved, walking towards the light, sucked in. Paul looked around the corner of the pub. The Agapemone was completely within the sphere of glow. The tower dismantled in the air, rising like a moon rocket. Most of the building was still intact. However, it all glowed, solid walls becoming transparent, light outlining mortar-pattern cracks in the brickwork, intolerable bursts through the windows. The lawns outside the Agapemone were a crush of pilgrims, looking up to Heaven.

He had a tooth-twinge, and Susan ouched as if she felt it too.

‘I still don’t get this,’ he said.

‘Do you know what consensus reality is?’ Susan asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘No, you don’t.’ She shook her head. ‘Not here, not in Alder, not around Anthony William Jago.’

‘What?’

‘There isn’t any consensus reality here. It’s been overruled. What we have right now is fascist reality.’

‘What’s Jago got to do with it?’

‘Everything. Jago is a psychic prodigy, and he can put a dent in reality. Everyone has dreams, fantasies, beliefs. Around Jago, they become concrete things. Monsters, angels, whatever. A lot of them are sexual, but it could be anything.’

That made sense, almost. The Martian war machine from his own mind. The Green Man from Maurice Maskell’s. Everything else, from everyone else.

‘And Jago has his own dreams, fantasies and beliefs.’

Lytton was listening carefully, nodding. Susan was a compulsive explainer, he thought, going around trying to force-feed information into people. He tried to swallow it all, to keep up with her mind-bursting gabble.

‘He can turn water into wine, Paul. I’ve tasted it. And those poor fucks out there are drunk on it.’

Beyond the wall, the tree was thrusting out of the earth, displaced roots cracking the tarmac, trunk swelling like a corpse pregnant with a million maggots. A root burst through the road and whipped in the air, tripping several starers. Paul, Susan, Lytton and Teddy huddled together against a wall. Paul heard a human wailing inside the dead thing.

‘Jago is a millennialist, Paul,’ Susan insisted. ‘A fundamentalist millennialist.’

A section of the tree bark was punched out from inside. It broke like a shield of charcoal. A wiry black arm emerged, six-fingered hand a twiggy fist, and then a head popped out. The imp, red tongue permanently stuck through black teeth, snorted hot coals.

‘Jago is your textbook God-bothered fanatic,’ Susan continued. ‘He believes in the prophecies of Armageddon. And maybe if he believes hard enough, he can make them come true.’

The tree fell apart, and a dozen or more imps, batwinged and swift, poured out of a hole in the ground, swarming into the air. A belch of brimstone followed. It was a pantomime trick, demons coming out of the stage in a puff of smoke, but it was also real.

‘Why here? Why now?’

‘He just passed critical mass. It had to be somewhere, it had to be some time. We got unlucky. What can I say,
que sera, sera…’

‘How do you know all this?’ Paul asked, afraid of the answer.

She smiled tightly, without humour. ‘Because I’m a prodigy, too, Paul. And we’ve been dumped in the same cage.’

A leathery reptile appendage broke the surface like a shark fin, a hundred yards away, and charged towards the pub, ploughing through asphalt, turning aside curls of earth and stone. The underground beast struggled for air, wake spreading.

Lytton propped Teddy against the wall, and pulled out his automatic. He primed it and assumed a shooter’s stance, left hand gripping his right wrist, gun aimed at the approaching dirt leviathan.

Eyes loomed on stalks, a flat, wide, several-mouthed head following. With a stereophonic roar, the beast burst from the ground, forty-foot dragon wings extending from a wormlike body, tips scraping houses on either side of the road. It was a superdynamation kindergarten nightmare, a thousand tons of hate wrapped in a dozen acres of fear.

Lytton shot the thing in the nose. The expelled cartridge pinged against a lawn table. A porthole of red explosion appeared in the beast’s face, and its eyes dimmed. Collapsing, it became a million gallons of oily substance and splattered over the road, dribbling into the cracks, washing in waves over the garden wall, flooding around their shins and against the wall. As it dispersed, the muck faded into the ground, gone without trace before the echo of its death rage died.

‘Feel happy now you’ve shot something?’ Susan asked.

Lytton shrugged.

Paul was happier without the beast around, but it had plenty of kith and kin. The skies were aswarm with winged things, and the ground was covered with creatures that crawled on their bellies. Between mad people and monsters, Alder was going to Hell.

Teddy was curled in a heap by the wall, trying to climb inside the bricks. He’d escaped the easy way, into his mind.

Lytton was obviously Mr Competent with the gun, the local Action Man. Somehow, that didn’t make Paul feel much safer.

‘What’s Jago doing?’ Paul asked.

‘Trying to end the world,’ Susan told him.

He thought about it, trying to swallow with his mind. ‘And who ya gonna call?’ she asked before he could. ‘We don’t have much choice, I’m afraid.’

Paul looked at her.

‘You, me and him,’ she said, thumbing towards Lytton.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘Quite.’

H
aving fallen asleep on Earth, Hazel woke up in Heaven. It wasn’t as she’d expected: an ascent to the clouds, glittering gates parting without a creak, ranks of Angels singing hymns, quiet contemplation and serenity. This Heaven was superimposed on the world she knew, more substantial by the minute. There were Angels, but they grew inside people, gradually emerging from human cocoons. And there was noise, not music. A wonderful, terrible, beautiful din rang throughout the Light. Every instrument ever created by man was playing at once, full blast, all the saints and sinners who’d ever lived singing the songs of their lives. In the row, it was impossible to pick out single sounds, but the combined music of all the world until now sounded like ‘Happy Birthday to You’ sung through bullhorns by the massed population of China.

Close by, Sister Janet was caught midway between human and Angel, thick-feathered wings splitting the sleeves of her blouse, halo forming around her fringe, inner light showing in patches through poor flesh. Others had changed without fuss and pain, but Janet found it harder. Her song was a scream. Her bones readjusted to wings, ribcage expanding to stretch her blouse tight, arms fusing with the feathers. Her halo burned bright, fuelled by beams radiating from her eyes and the fissures of her skull. Her scream became a bird squawk, and she flapped wildly, one wing batting away a chunk of brickwork hanging nearby. The chunk floated slowly into the Light, crumbling. Others, full Angels or unaffected, gathered around Janet, trying to soothe, to calm her down before she did damage.

Beloved was unmoved by His disciple’s plight. Failure of this test would mean expulsion from the ranks of the Chosen. Hazel, still a newcomer, knew little. Knowing was less important than being, she understood. Last night, she’d become Beloved’s Sister-Love, which meant she’d won a celestial contest without even being aware she had been entered. She had the pack-tops and her slogan prevailed, now she was at the right hand of the Lamb. She felt a pulling at her heart, tugging her towards Beloved, towards her prepared role.

Jenny was by her, a robe ready. Eyes fixed on Beloved, Hazel stepped off the bed and into the robe, which Jenny fastened. It tied at the waist and shoulders, but was vented down to the small of her back. To make room for wings. The floor was a soft carpet of Light, like condensed cloud, and gravity wasn’t working. Small objects drifted from their places and slowly ascended. Jenny’s hair was bobbing in tendrils as if she were floating underwater, bubbles leaking from her smile. The Light was warm, but not hot. As bright as the sun, it didn’t hurt her eyes. It tickled her ankles and exposed arms, and sparkled in the air, washing around everything like a liquid one hundred times thinner than water.

From Beloved’s face, she could tell her barely remembered old life was over. It might have happened to someone else, and been told to her. She no longer had a family, friends, a boyfriend. She had the Brethren of the Agapemone. She had Beloved.

Janet was airborne, fighting currents of Light, getting the hang of flight. She flapped off, vanishing into the Light, then came back, kicking at the air. She hovered over Beloved for a moment, and then pulled herself up into the sky, rocketing towards her own Heaven.

‘The book,’ Jenny prompted.

Hazel didn’t know what her handmaid meant, but eventually her thoughts came together. Seven flames burned in the floor. They rose into the air like bubbles, revolved in concentric circles, then burst. From the point where the flames met, a book appeared. It fell to the bed, bouncing once on the mattress. Hazel looked to Beloved, but got nothing from Him. She must find her own way, with only her handmaid’s cues to guide her. The book looked like a Bible, handsomely bound with gold inlay and tooled leather. It had a shining steel spine, and was locked with seven bands of metal, two at the bottom, two at the top, and three at the side. The bands were welded in place by red lumps of wax, inset into which were ceramic buttons, glazed with symbols she didn’t recognize but could have traced.

‘The book with seven seals,’ Jenny explained.

A knot in Hazel’s mind untied, and words came, issued from her mouth. ‘Who is worthy to open the book,’ she asked, ‘and to loose the seals thereof?’

Jenny squeezed her arm encouragingly. She felt as good as she’d done when, at six, she’d remembered and perfectly enunciated her single line in the nativity play, ‘I bring myrrh.’

Hazel picked up the book. It was as light as an empty cereal packet.

‘Behold,’ Jenny said, ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David…’

Hazel walked towards the place where Beloved sat upon His throne, surrounded by Light. Once, this had been a small upstairs bedroom; now, it was a vast plain, at once above and upon the Earth. Hazel walked between ranks of Angels, bare feet sinking a little into the thick-pile Light. Among the Angels, she saw the transformed faces of the Brethren. She recognized Derek, free at last of Wendy; Kate, nursing a golden child to her breast; Gerald, purged of his inner violence; Cindy, lost in rapture.

‘Thou art worthy to take the book,’ she said to Beloved, words pouring from her, ‘and to open the seals thereof, for thou was slain, and hast redeemed us by thy blood. And we shall reign on the Earth.’

She spoke as she walked, and distance expanded. Light grew, becoming clearer as it spread. Angels filled the skies to the infinite distance. Among them, Hazel saw Patch, Mum, Paul, schoolfriends, Wendy, boys she’d forgotten. Everyone she’d ever met, so much as shared a bus with. A sea of faces flowed around and above, wings knitting into one mass, haloes linked like a chain, robes flowing together. In her mind, she found more words, ‘and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand’.

At the foot of the throne, she looked up at Beloved. He seemed miles above her, but she could reach out and touch Him, for she was His Sister-Love. Jenny was by her side, smiling and golden. His wounds opened and shining blood flowed from His feet and hands, streams pooling before His throne, rising to Hazel’s knees. She was washed in the blood of the Lamb. She raised the book above her head, its seven seals blinking like seven eyes. Beloved took it, and she was relieved of a huge burden. Hazel and Jenny knelt in the blood of the Lamb and dipped their hands to the pool, feeling the thrill. For a moment, Hazel was Jenny and Jenny was Hazel. Their understandings doubled, they embraced in the pool—now up around their waists—and looked to Beloved, adoring, praising, beseeching.