Mandrake (31 page)

Lightning came again, dancing behind them; the two shadows were great spheres, like dark new planets towering over the earth, or the impossible domes of a dream city. ‘In Xanadu…
^’
His mind groped as he struggled to head the car into the gale. Thunder roared and bellowed round them, the air shook with it; he was conscious of being very small. Anything could happen, anything was possible. Where were they?

Beth had seen the strange shapes too, she touched his arm.

‘David, look! What is it? Out there!’

Oakley called through the noise: ‘Coming up behind us. Got their lights on. About a mile back.
^’

‘Need ours soon.
^’
Queston was peering into the murk. The sky flared, and the two dark spheres jumped into sudden sight again, ahead, to the left of the road. This time Oakley saw.

‘Jesus!’

Beth’s voice rose, and cracked. ‘What are they? O David, they’re horrible. Don’t go near them, don’t—’

‘Take your choice—Martians or the Ministry.’

‘Martians nothing,’ Oakley shouted, gripping the back of the seat between them. The car was pitching and swaying like a boat. ‘It’s the Bradwell warning station. The laser. And damned dangerous if it’s still switched on.’

‘Bradwell?’

‘Built around 1972. Covers Europe and the Channel. Mandrake was behind it, in his early days. Peace through watchfulness, that was his line then. They moved about three thousand people to build it there—Christ-awful row at the time. And some nasty things happened when the back to your roots game began.’

‘D’you think Mandrake got back to Oxford, when we left him?’

‘Before the place caved in—or afterwards?’

The sky raged and thundered over them; blue-white light flashed on wet roofs, and houses silent and dark.

‘This is some kind of town.’

‘Maldon.’

The word rang through Queston’s spinning brain like a trumpet, and suddenly the emptiness that had always been a part of him was peopled, and everything was there clear, clearer than it had ever been. Mandrake had been right in one thing: ideas could come true. But not only new ideas; ideas that had been conceived a dozen centuries ago. Maldon… Maldon… ‘There was a battle there once—’

‘They’re catching up! ’ Beth was staring over her shoulder. Queston wrenched himself out of his mind, glanced in his mirror, and saw swaying points of yellow light like two pairs of eyes. The sky was almost dark now; he could not make out the shapes of the cars. He slowed slightly, saw a turning on his right and skidded down it, rocking the car hard down on one side. Twisting round two more corners, he came out on an open road sweeping south through fields flat as the sea. Towering over them, on the horizon, flickering light and dark in the lightning crashing continuously now out of the sky, the two dark spheres of the laser station loomed bigger still. It was a poor road, and he had to switch on his lights; the car leapt and jerked. He looked in his mirror, and saw the yellow eyes reappear.

‘We passed a danger notice.’ Beth stared back out of the rear window. ‘I couldn’t see what else it said.’

‘Faster than light,’ Oakley said softly. Through the thunder, Queston could hear his voice, and the words seemed meaningless. But he thought they had the intimate allusiveness of a private joke; and he heard Beth laugh. He gripped the wheel harder.

The headlamps caught a board, and staring red letters:
danger
.

‘There again.’ Oakley peered swiftly. ‘It’s the edge of the radar field. They leave a terrific margin, of course, and there’s no danger from the laser in this direction. Maybe the radar isn’t working now, anyway—you can’t tell whether the scanners are moving.’

‘It’ll be working all right. That’s what’s caused all the trouble since the beginning.’ Queston’s lights picked up another notice:
bradwell ioo yards.
Suddenly he was swept with rage at the monstrous, devastating suspicion that had become both power and paralysis; and the furtive, watchful bulk of the radar station seemed one vast symbol of everything that had woken the earth into violence. He said abruptly: ‘I’m going in there.’

‘David, no!’

Ahead of them he saw the main gate of the station, and the rough side road leading in; and he saw that the entrance was clear. Broken by the storm, or by some other violence, the fence lay flattened for several yards, and the gate hung deserted and open at one side. He turned hard to the left, switching off his lights, and plunged down through the entrance to an uneven causeway of rough stones. The sense of familiarity grew stronger: how did he know this place?

He wound down the window as he drove, and put his head out; the wind lashed full into his face with icy, whipping rain, and he drove as fast as he dared down the bumpy road, watching its dark edge. Oakley shouted at him; he caught the word ‘tunnel’ but nothing more. He could feel Beth’s hand nervously gripping his knee, her fingers tight and afraid.

Then suddenly there was an iron gate before them; no fence, only a gate alone, barring the road between towering posts. He thrust his foot at the brake, and heard a tyre burst, and the car slewed giddily round and stopped.

He looked back. The yellow eyes of light were turning towards them off the main road.

‘Stay there.’

He ran through the raging rain to the gate, but it was locked. In a flare of lightning he saw that it barred an entrance where the road tilted down into the earth, and he remembered Oakley’s shout. This tunnel was the only way into the station: the only safe way.

He stood under the storm, and before him there was only the gate that reared up alone, with nothing on either side, barring a road that vanished under the earth, and beyond that nothing again. Only the open fields stretching all round, shining wet in the flash of lightning, white under a black sky.

He knew there could not be much time now, and he knew he was glad. He went back to the car. ‘The gun there, love, quick.’ Beth handed him the revolver. Oakley was already out in the rain with his own.

‘Stay inside,’ Queston said to her. Exhilaration had hold of him, he could feel his lips wanting to stretch into a smile. But she must stay safe. His voice whipped out curt in the wind. ‘Get down on the floor. Curl up. And don’t move.’ He wished he could see her face.

The first car drew up ten yards away; their own lay sideways, blocking the road. Oakley pulled him down behind the bonnet, and a spotlight leapt out from the other car. But the beam shone harmlessly over their heads, lighting the rain into swift slanting lines, and did not move.

The lightning snapped in jagged streaks now, and the sky roared, as if all the elements bore down to batter at them. It was a storm more violent than anything Queston had ever seen, and they stood at its centre. And the place was alive, the flat dead beaten fields and the marshes beyond: under the rage of the rain and wind, they hummed with a life and a controlled menace that he could sense like an animal smelling death. He dug his fingers into the hard rubber of the car tyre.

Behind the spotlight, figures moved.

‘Queston!’

The voice was faint, shouting into the wind, with a strain in it more than the effort to be heard.

‘Queston! Come out, you and the other, and the girl will be safe.’

It was impossible, but there could be no mistake.

‘My God,’ Queston said. ‘It’s Mandrake!’

‘It can’t be. Not here—’

‘It’s Mandrake, I tell you.’

‘Was he shamming? Hell no, the man was nearly dead. We took him less than a mile from Oxford, from his roots, and he nearly died—’

‘You must have been right about Oxford. It must have gone. Like Gloucester. So somehow that released him from the pull.’

‘He’s a fiend,’ Oakley said hoarsely. He sounded almost afraid.

‘Queston!’ The voice came again through the storm. The beam of light was abruptly cut off. But in the same moment lightning flared once more, and they both saw one of the uniformed Ministry drivers moving silently up along the edge of the road.

Oakley shouted: ‘Get back, or I’ll shoot.’

The driver jerked up his arm; in the chaos of thunder and rain they barely heard the shot, but the bullet rang near them, glancing off the car. White light flashed again, briefly flooding the road, and in the same moment Oakley fired across the bonnet and the man in uniform twisted sideways like a dancer, clutching his chest, and fell backwards to lie still in the field.

And Queston, crouching, felt the first gentle tremor of the earth.

He screamed a warning at Oakley, lunged for the door and pulled Beth out of the car. They staggered as the second tremor came a long hideous ripple over the earth as if it were water; and still the thunder was crashing overhead and the sky awash with white light. The storm was the voice of the earthquake, roaring like a great rage. And then almost at once the third shock came, a rippling, juddering shake that sent all three of them stumbling helpless back off the road like swimmers caught by a wave. Clutching at Beth, clutching for his own balance at the air, Queston heard a roar that was not thunder, and through it the thin squeal of voices in mortal fear; and on the road he saw the twin headlight beams of the two Ministry cars shake, and lurch, and gradually tilt up to the sky.

When they were almost vertical the arms of light lurched more wildly than before, so that for a swift horrible moment it was as if they were alive, waving for help. Then they leapt round in a rushing arc and suddenly died in the dark; and through the rearing lightning he saw the long gaping black fissure that had swallowed them; and heard no more cries; and there was nothing.

Nothing but Mandrake, standing before them at the edge of the road, alone, his raincoat flailing open and his face contorted against the wind and rain. The lightning glinted on the gun in his hand, and Queston saw with a cold shock that he was laughing: a grimacing perversion of laughter, shaking his body but not his hand or his eyes, and the more frightful because in the howl of the storm it made no sound.

In the same instant he realized that his own hand was empty, and that in the tossing of the earthquake he had lost his gun.

He had forgotten Oakley. Beside him, the journalist fired and leapt at Mandrake in the same swift lunge. But Mandrake’s gun was too quick for him, and in mid-stride his small body spun round and fell.

Beth screamed. Queston stood limply holding her, staring without movement as if he watched out of a dream, while Mandrake raised his arm again in glaring triumph and took deliberate aim.

No sound came through the tearing wind; only the face changed. The gun was empty. Mandrake’s dark, young-old face crumpled out of triumph; and Queston woke out of his spell and flung Beth aside, and stumbled towards him with destruction in his hands.

The Minister stared for a moment in animal fear, and then he turned and ran. Racing, half-falling, his coat flapping like the wings of a great bird, he made first for the main road; then veered away from the long dark gap that yawned before him in the earth, and ran with long wild strides over the fields. Before him, the two dark spheres loomed in the flickering sky. High up, Queston saw now the skeletal outline of the radar scanners; and saw that one of them, shifted out of alignment by the earthquake, leaned crazily downwards now towards the part of the field where Mandrake ran.

Queston shouted in horror to no one but the wind: ‘The
laser…!
’

It was as if Mandrake hit an invisible deadly barrier. His scream came back on the wind, a swift sound cut off as soon as it began; and suddenly he was gone.

At once the storm erupted into a new tremendous violence. All the earth and sky seemed to flash and roar and explode round the spot where Queston stood; all reality disintegrated into a crashing chaos, drawing him into it so that he had no existence of his own. Deaf and blind with the force of it, he became aware through the blazing roar in his senses of a surrealist image dancing in disorder: the twin domes of the laser station out over the saltings, dark against the awful brilliance of the sky. Blue light ran over their rounded outline like water, like the leaping flame-edge of an eclipsed sun; and as he watched, suddenly first one and then the other exploded, blurring the picture into a great orange glare. He saw glowing shards of metal, flung into the air, rise and curve and fall lazily down, and through the howl of the storm the new splitting note of destruction came to him on the gale.

Then gradually, very gradually, the roar and blaze of the storm began to die. The lightning flickered down, and the thunder began to grumble more gently, farther away; the wind faltered, and the viciousness went out of the rain.

Beth said: ‘What happened to him?’

‘The laser. His favourite toy. Mr Mandrake’s gone to join the Intelligence. Maybe they were one and the same thing all along.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The radar at that station was set to pick up and identify any approaching foreign missile, and train a laser on it—a fantastic beam of light that vaporizes anything in its path. So, pouf—no more missile. Only something happened to the radar, in that earthquake. It picked up Mandrake or some other object instead.’

She nodded, dully, and turned to where Oakley lay in the rank grass. ‘Christopher.’

‘Yes,’ Queston said.

He knelt and turned Oakley over, wiping the mud from his cheek. The heart-beat was strong. There were small patches of blood on both front and back of his jacket; the bullet seemed to have gone straight through the shoulder without deflection, narrowly missing the collarbone.

‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘He’ll be all right.’

He stood up, and looked helplessly out across the dark saltings, through the rain that had died now to a fine insistent mist. Beth came close to him, and he held her tightly for a moment.

‘Everyone’ll be all right now,’ he said. ‘If there’s anyone else left. Just the three of us, if we don’t find anyone. The earth will go back to sleep now. We have to make sure we let it lie.’

He took the belt from her coat and used it to tie Oakley’s injured upper arm carefully to his side. Then he picked him up out of the wet grass and carried him across to the car; together he and Beth manoeuvred the limp figure inside to lie on the back seat. Queston tried the engine; it seemed to be undamaged still. If he drove carefully, it would be possible to get back to the main road across the fields, skirting the long black fissure gaping silent in the earth.