Jago (65 page)

Look.

Lytton followed Susan’s direction, and for a moment couldn’t see what she meant. Rising out of the crowd was the tree that shaded his own front door, children hanging out of it like agile monkeys.

There’s nothing there.

Precisely.

The Gate House was gone, collapsed or torn down. In its place was a Gordian knot of naked bodies. The cluster-fuck had grown, swollen with sinners who’d lost the hope of Heaven and saw no reason for restraint, and Calvinists who believed predestination had won them a ticket to Paradise and their own actions could not queer their passage.

‘Fucking Hell,’ he said.

That’s right. That’s exactly what it is. The Fucking Hell.

A head and torso rode the orgy. It was Sharon Coram, greased with bodily secretions, singing out in a continuous coming. Someone turned a hose on the cluster, but water just added to the lubrication. Some components of the churning pyramid only moved because people moved against them. Those at the bottom must have suffocated or been pressed to death. In the end, everyone would wind up at the bottom.

They tried to force their way through the gates, staying as far away as possible from the cluster. It had destroyed his house and was sucking in new people all the time. Lytton thought of things lost for ever, and realized there was nothing irreplaceable. He had not spent his life picking up essentials. He’d miss a few music and video tapes, and some of his broken-in clothes. Otherwise, he’d have junked it all when the job was over anyway.

A middle-aged man attacked the cluster with the hose, sloshing and whipping. He called a halt like an exasperated football referee during a twenty-two man punch-up on the field. He was inveighing loudly against sin and sodomy, lust and lechery…

Who is that? he thought.

You don’t see him around much,
Susan said in his mind.
It’s the vicar.

Arms and legs reached out of the heaving cluster, and the vicar was pulled in, stuck to the surface of the heap of bodies. His clothes tore as he was worked, protesting, to the apex. Sharon was waiting for him, a ravenous queen spider, and her tongue was halfway down his throat in an instant. His lower body was sucked in towards Sharon’s momentarily unoccupied loins, and the cluster gave an obscene cheer as he began to respond. In a minute, he was just another part of the permanent floating orgy. The abandoned hosepipe spewed water.

Lytton and Susan were through the gateway. Inside the grounds, the press wasn’t quite so bad. Able to breathe almost easily, they walked across the lawn to the Agapemone.

‘Well,’ he said, setting foot on the human steps, ‘here goes…’

* * *

Barbarians were at the gates. Alarums sounded.

‘And I stood upon the sand,’ Jenny said, ‘and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy…’

She looked to Allison, who was ready. The girl saluted Beloved. They knew who was coming, and how he must be met.

* * *

This close, Susan was almost doubled with pain, a mass screaming inside her mind. She forced herself onwards.
Excelsior!
Jago’s unconfined energy rioted, eating away her Talent, spreading frenzy like an infection through the crowds. It had got worse as they climbed the hill, and it had been bad enough down in the village.

You’ll have to kill him quickly,
she thought,
cleanly.

James understood. All those briefings must have got through to him.

The knot of sexuality from the Fucking Hell made her uneasy. A lot of Jago’s unconscious problems were sexual, and they found fruitful soil in people around him. Everyone was screwed up in the bedroom. Even straight Christianity was founded on the repression of sexual drives; Jago’s brand systemized his belief-corseted desires into an entire panoply of rituals and practices.

Inside the Agapemone, choirs of angels chorused. Divine Light throbbed in the walls, and the Chosen raised alleiluyas to His name.

Sex and God. That was the recipe for an Anthony William Jago. Take a kid and fuck with his mind, teach him sex is an activity for sewers and God a bearded bastard who smites multitudes. Throw in the kind of zealous drive that leads to high office, extreme wealth and a following of thousands. Then give that kid the power to destroy a continent. Forget the Talent. It was a wonder that, after the Jago education, no one had conventionally ended the world. Beloved wasn’t unique in his upbringing, just in his capabilities.

The hall wasn’t empty. Others had ventured in, and stood about, bewildered. A foil-and-cardboard-skirted Roman legionary was a refugee from some fancy-dress theatre group, thin-chested inside his Stallone-shaped breastplate. Irena Dubrovna, the resident echo, was in her doorway, blindly watching. She was almost solid, another side effect of Jago’s mental meltdown. Susan thought the others could see her too. There were people trapped inside the walls like flies in amber. By the front door, arms and legs stuck out like mounted trophies.

‘Where?’ James asked.

She nodded towards the stairs. The focus was in the centre of the house. James thumb-cocked his automatic, and began up the main staircase.

Someone appeared on the landing and charged, fists flailing, bellowing rage. A gust of hatred came with the man, thumping Susan between the eyes. The vileness of the unleashed mind made her want to vomit. It crawled and squirmed around him, pouring on to Susan like stinking waste.

Faster than her eye could catch it, James brought up his gun and shot the man in the head. The hate was turned off like a radio, but he kept charging. His body thudded against James, knocking him backwards. They both fell to the floor, carpet wrinkling under them. Susan, relieved at the sudden removal of the man’s jarring burst of emotion, helped James get out of the mess and to his feet. The corpse wore the last of a police constable’s uniform, his face and hands tattooed with skulls and swastikas, symbols covering every inch of his skin. The last of his hate leaked away, melting into the floor.

‘Erskine,’ James spat.

He was shaking. He had never killed before, and was having to deal with it. Susan wasn’t sure the snake was strong enough for this job. His speciality was surveillance, not assassination. She held him, hand to his forehead, and tried to soothe his worries away, to clean his doubts.
It’ll be all right,
she thought, really trying to mean it,
it’ll be all right.

Roughly, he shoved her away. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I won’t be brainwashed.’

His disgust hurt her, but she was humbled, ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘No, you’re not.’

* * *

He heard the call of the soil. The land was imperilled. He pulled up roots, and stumped out of the garden of the Pottery. Sue-Clare and the children were still a part of him, just as he was a part of them. Their togetherness gave him pleasure. The tree-worshippers, already organized into a hierarchy, followed at a respectful distance.

‘We are your servants, oh Swamp Thing,’ said Dolar, who wore a garland of Maskell’s leaves around his forehead.

They’d been eating his fruit, and were on the way to becoming part of the family. Dolar had been hurt, and the fruit was making him better. Tiny shoots emerged from his speckled shoulder wound, pea-green boils stood out on his knuckles.

He knew where he should take root. The centre of Alder had shifted, from the Valiant Soldier to the Agapemone. The village should have known that when the old tree died. He was the new tree, and would last for centuries, growing from the heart of the community.

* * *

He wasn’t sorry Barry Erskine was dead. He wasn’t even sorry he’d been the one to kill him. But Lytton was still shaking. If not in body, in mind. And he knew Susan could tell if he was shaking inside. When she slipped into his mind and tried to shape him, he understood how Jago worked on his disciples. And he felt like a tool, like the conscienceless piece of machinery in his hand. Susan was trying to aim him at Jago, groping in his head for a trigger.

Two landings up, the Agapemone no longer even resembled the Manor House. It had become someone’s idea of Heaven, walls of white silk billowing gently, marble fountains of warm milk at every corner, air honeyed with incense. Classical busts of Jago perched on pedestals at regular intervals, faces wise, suffering and benevolent.

Susan was close behind, urging. She was homing in on Jago like a plane following a radio signal. Even he felt the force of Jago’s Talent. It was all around, like the sourceless light.

Eleven bullets. No, ten. The monster, Erskine, and the pointless warning shot. A spare clip in his pocket.

In Heaven, it was cool and calming. He still heard noise from outside, but very low in the background. Susan tugged his arm and pointed up another flight of stairs. Warily, they climbed again.

* * *

Teddy saw claws scrabbling at the frame of the window, then crunching around the wooden bars, smashing the glass. Paul picked up a stool and stabbed at the window like a lion-tamer, shooing away whatever was outside. Teddy covered his face with his arm, and heard the window and a considerable chunk of the wall being torn away. He still hurt, but thought he could probably run if he had to. He’d felt safer with James around. Paul was much more panicky, and had already lost Pam to the winged woman. He choked on dust, and looked again.

‘Come on,’ Paul said, ‘we can’t stay here.’

The beams of the low ceiling were creaking threateningly, the whole of one wall gone. Beyond the rubble, Teddy saw large insects fighting over a scrap that had once been alive. Whenever his cracked ribs ground, the insects wavered and vanished.

He got up and, with Paul, ran. With Susan gone, the shell of the Valiant Soldier had turned from refuge to trap. They hurdled the wreckage, and emerged blinking into a dark world lit by a glow from the Agapemone and the bright red of infernal fires. The battle was on the ground on all sides, also in the air. Demon things tore each other. An eight-foot-tall hooded skeleton with an old-fashioned scythe was cutting out the feet from under running people.

‘That must be Death,’ Paul observed.

A bull-headed beast with the body of a lion and the tail of a lizard charged and bore down upon Death, crushing him to the ground, snapping his scythe, scattering his bones with a worrying shake of his head.

‘Great,’ Paul said, ‘Death is a pussy.’

‘Look,’ said Teddy, pointing up.

Between giant bats and rocketing pterodactyls, a set of ordinary lights winked. Teddy heard blades whirring and felt wind on his face. The helicopter hovered as a large searchlight tried to mark out a level spot for a safe landing. Through open side doors, Teddy saw two huddled rows of soldiers, clutching guns, gasmasks on. Paul waved his arms up at the helicopter. A soldier drew a bead and, for a horrible moment, Teddy was sure the dickheaded squaddie was going to put a bullet in Paul’s head.

Something with black butterfly wings swished against the rotor blades and was food-processed into a cloud of shreds. The helicopter dipped, the soldier with the gun tipped back into the body. Paul threw himself to the road, hands over his head. Teddy was fascinated by how slowly the disaster happened. The helicopter gently swayed as it turned wrong side up, drifting peacefully down. The seconds dripped by lazily. Two or three people fell out, arms and legs waving for a moment, and broke on the road. The rotors described a circle in the air, the helicopter creaking and complaining, sparks cascading out of its engine. A rotor scraped a wall, and the heavy machine was catapulted out of Teddy’s sight in a screeching cartwheel. It thumped over what was left of the pub and plopped into the dark beyond. An explosion behind the pub knocked Teddy backwards, almost off his feet, and a bright orange cloud expanded, burning his eyes.

The pub was on fire, flames licking the rubble. The pub sign was broken on the pavement, and the corked bottles inside were exploding, flinging burning spirits out in splashes. Teddy looked around for Paul, and thought he’d been trampled under. A gang of leather girls with knives were prowling the area, two on motorbikes. They had angels tied up and dragging behind them. One of the girls had a bloody pair of torn-off wings stapled to her jacket. Not a girl, he realized; it was Mrs Keyte, his geography teacher.

Fuck, things were out of hand!

Behind him, close, he heard a familiar growl, beginning low and rumbling lower, spits of viciousness beneath the rasp.

‘Terry?’

He turned around, and saw the large shape detach itself from the shadows. A long tongue touched the floor. On four padded feet, his brother jogged towards him, wet teeth catching red light.

* * *

They entered what Jago must think of as his throne room. It was precisely the fantasy Susan expected. A choir singing his praises, women prostrate at his feet, incense-stink of sanctity thick all around. Jenny, serene in Jago’s madness, and a dark, dangerous girl attended Beloved’s throne. The girl in his lap, mind flickering tinily like a fly in a web, was Hazel. Up at the top of the house, the curtain walls were fluffier, indistinguishable from clouds. A pool of light beside the throne afforded a God’s-eye-view of the strife down in the village, a black relief map dotted with flames, swarming with antlike doomed souls. Her head was close to critical mass.

‘Jago!’ James shouted, trying to get the Lord God’s attention.

The congregation turned to look, with a craning of necks and a rustle of wings. Some of the more harpy-like angels squawked. James and Susan walked down the gold-carpeted aisle, like Dorothy and friends in the chamber of the great and powerful Oz. The aisle grew longer, as if they were strolling the wrong way on a moving pavement. James had his gun tucked into his jeans, at the back, under his jacket. He wanted to get near without being torn apart. Tendrils of fear linked their minds, stretched now to breaking.

‘…and I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death,’ Sister Jenny said, ‘and his deadly wound was healed, and all the world wondered after the beast.’