Omega (4 page)

'Have you noticed something?' Dan said. 'There aren't any cops.'

Moira frowned, puzzled. She hadn't noticed it but it was true. The handful of police outside the Great Circle, amiable or bored, exchanging the odd joke or accepting the odd chicken-leg during the feast if the Sergeant wasn't looking, had become such an accepted part of the Festival scene that she simply hadn't thought about them; yet tonight, she realized, the only uniforms in sight were the usual St John's men and women around their ambulance, fifty metres along the ridge.

'But why?' Moira wondered.

'Perhaps they've decided it's not worth it. After all, they never have anything to do. . . . Jesus! They're coming in!'

The demonstrators, banner aloft, had marched into the Great Circle, trampling straight through the little Circles towards the Cauldron, chanting in unison: 'Goddess worship is Satan worship! Goddess worship is Satan worship! Goddess worship is Satan worship!'

Some of the older people not in the Dance were running forward, trying to stop them. But the demonstrators were young, clothed and booted, and swept the elderly skyclad bodies easily aside. The younger baby-minding fathers, like Dan, hesitated, torn between repelling the intruders and standing guard over their children. Moira grabbed at Dan's arm, restraining him; he shrugged helplessly and acquiesced.

But now the dancers'had heard the chanting and had turned, incredulous anger in their faces. The demonstrators did not pause; they headed straight for the Sabbat Queen, who was clearly their target.

The chanting changed. 'Witch whore! Witch whore! Witch whore!'

That final blasphemy broke the Ring. The dancers swept down on the invaders, boots or no boots. The banner swayed and fell in a mass of clothed and unclothed bodies.

Diana was sobbing now. Moira hugged her fiercely, cried out: 'Dan! Look! The Altar!'

As she pointed, the white statue of the Goddess tottered and fell. More intruders, unnoticed till now, were tearing the fragile polystyrene into great lumps, scattering them about the smashed Altar.

Moira screamed.

It was then that the unbelievable happened. The ground beneath them, the whole of Bell Beacon, moved, throwing attackers and defenders alike off their feet. It only lasted for a few seconds, but in those seconds the hill groaned like a giant in pain. Then it was still.

There was a moment, after the turmoil, of silence, the silence of utter shock.

One of the demonstrators, a wild-eyed woman, was the first on her feet. 'It's the wrath of God!' she yelled. 'The wrath of God, smiting the witches
1'

Naked bodies sprang up to drag her down and the fight was on again; then, above the screaming and the shouting and the tears came the sound of the motor-cycles roaring up the long slanting road.

Moira and Dan stood stunned, no longer able to take it all in. Even Diana, clutched between them, was soundless and trembling.

The motor-cyclists, a dozen helmete
d, visored, anonymous monsters, charged on to the plateau, sweeping into a circle round the melee, herding it inward towards the fire like armoured sheepdogs.

Dan shook Moira out of her paralysis, shouting at her over the din: 'Clothes! Quick!'

Suddenly and desperately active, Moira swept the little altar bare and tore open the hamper-lid, flinging out sweaters, jeans, plimsolls from underneath the pathetic provisions for the feast that would never be eaten. Rosemary and Greg ran up and joined them; how they had dodged through the cordon of bikes, Moira had no time to wonder.

Throwing clothes on to Diana and herself, she heard Greg shout to Daniel, 'Got to get the girls out of this!' Dan nodded, grimly.

Clothed, Greg started trying to pack the hamper, but Daniel waved him off it. 'Leave it - no time!' By unspoken instinct, the four of them grabbed the ritual tools in then-hands and stuck their athames, the black-handled knives which are each witch's personal symbol, into their belts.

Then they were running, Diana held in Dan's arms.

The motor-cylists were tightening and loosening their ring, teasing the crowd inside it. The Cauldron lay beyond the ring, toppled and abandoned. Greg, in the lead, saw
that that was the clearest path, and made for it. But as he reached it, he halted in his tracks, staring down.

Moira followed his look, and screamed again.

Naked and dead, the gilded iron Lance of Light impaling her belly, lay the Sabbat Queen, staring upwards; their lovely Joy, their friend.

Dan pulled Moira away, roughly. Through her tears, she saw John, berserk in his torn golden kilt, a burning log in his hand, leap crazily between two motor-cycles and run to his dead wife. Standing over her, he flung the log at the engine of a passing cycle.

Machine and rider burst into flame, colliding with the next, which swerved aside and then fell. The hemmed-in crowd saw, and copied; all at once the hunters became the hunted, trying to escape a shower of blazing missiles.

Dan almost swept Moira off her feet, hustling her over the edge of the plateau away from the horror.

There was one more earth tremor as the five of them stumbled down the path towards their car. But it was slight, and stunned by all that had happened, they barely noticed it.

3

It was obvious from the London papers (there were no Manchester or Glasgow editions all day, till power had been restored) that the geologists and seismologists either could not or would not explain what had happened; and even those who were brave enough not to take refuge in incomprehensible jargon, contradicted each other. The disturbance, whatever it was, must lie deep; because a chain of shocks that ran from Merseyside into Wales, and then obliquely
across the Cotswolds and Chiltern
s to the North Downs, made no kind of sense in terms of surface structure; any well-e
ducated layman could see
that. In Scotland, of course, the tremor that smashed the canal locks all along the Great Glen, and caused serious fires in Fort William, Invergarry, Fort Augustus and Inverness, was more understandable. On the subject of that ruler-straight primordial fracture, the nature of which was clear from any child's atlas, the experts pontificated at length to cover their vagueness over the rest.

Reports from the continent were equally puzzling. Most dramatic was the breach in Holland's Ijsselmeer dyke, through which the North Sea was pouring to inundate
thousands of hectares of hard-won polder. But this, geologically speaking, was a mere incident in the strange network of tremors that stretched from Portugal to the Caspian, and south-west (more conventionally) into the Balkans and Turkey.

Deaths in the circumstances were remarkably few, in Britain at least. Fourteen people had died and six were missing in the collapse of a Salford block of flats; nine had drowned in a capsized pleasure craft on Loch Linnhe; and five had been killed by an exploding gas-main at Reading. Apart from these, no single British incident (the first day's reports suggested) had killed more than two. The total ranged from sixty-seven in
The Times
to 103 in the
Sun
. The continental figures were higher, though still very tentative; but in the trauma of home disaster, foreign deaths were statistics not people.

Disaster it was, of course - all the headlines said so. But as the hours passed and the fires were doused and the telephone panic by anxious relatives had abated a little, the usual defence mechanisms began to work. Those with problems were busy coping with them, those unaffected were busy congratulating themselves and a kind of eerie calm seemed to prevail. It was helped by the quite uncharacteristic promptness and efficiency of the emergency relief services - which aroused the curiosity of some of the more observant citizens, though this curiosity was for some reason not reflected by the media.

The media also avoided reporting the fact that three of Britain's eight Mohowatt electrodes were out of action, their conductors having been fractured by the tremors at a considerable depth. Fortunately two of the couples were still working and recently redundant conventional power stations could be brought back into service (again with uncharacteristic speed), so the Central Electricity Generating Board did not find it necessary to be publicly specific about the damage.

Practically the only reference (and that one indirect) to Mohowatt was in the
Evening News's
first leader in its 4.30 edition, which ran, after a platitudinous opening paragraph:

As the overall picture becomes clearer, the feeling must be acknowledged that Mother Earth has issued a warning. Never before in history has an earthquake struck, simultaneously, across the face of Europe. Yet no single incident was truly catastrophic, on the scale of such classic disasters as San Francisco, Agadir, or Skopje.

Why was the blow so widespread, yet so locally lenient? The experts cannot tell us. Whatever Mother Earth is up to, it is so deep in her womb that they fail to analyse it.

We have done many strange things to her in recent years - some perhaps with too hasty greed and too scanty knowledge. Is this her rap over the knuckles, to brace us for the real disaster?

If so, we must hope that our leaders and administrators are heeding her voice. She is not in the habit of warning twice.

The leader had disappeared from the 5.00 edition. Fleet Street rumour spoke of a phone call to the Editor from Downing Street and of the sudden relegation of a leader writer to the subs' desk.

The relegation, at least, was fact. The victim was a promising young journalist called George Barrett, who had only recently been given a chance to try leader-writing. Today, back on the desk as abruptly as he had left it, his first subbing chore was to tack a new head and intro on to the below-the-fold story on page 7: THREE DIE IN WITCH FESTIVAL RIOT. PA tape said that a fourth - a seven-year-old boy - had died in hospital. A dead child (especially a naked one) always enlivened a story lead, the professional half of his mind observed, while acknowledging that the flaxen-haired beauty impaled with a golden spear (and also naked) would have to retain pride of place. One motor-cyclist burned to death and two others hospitalized, plus one clothed woman demonstrator dead from multiple injuries, made a good second par. He typed the new intro with practised speed, while the human half of his mind felt slightly sick. Unreligious himself, he rather liked the witches.
...
He told himself that on an ordinary day the story would have made the front page and possibly the splash. But this was no ordinary day. He wondered again why the Old Man had been so embarrassed about his demotion, wrapping it up with unconvincing flattery about the desk needing the best men in this crisis. Oh, well - easy come, easy go. He tossed the revised copy to the Chief Sub's tray, and reached for the next.

It was a phoned piece from their Bath stringer, reporting that the Cheddar caves had been closed to visitors, after the first morning tour had come up complaining of an irritant dust in the air of the lower chambers. The local Medical Officer of Health had ordered an inspection. Several of the party were in hospital with severe pulmonary symptoms.

The sub's professional instincts nudged at him, mysteriously. He frowned for a moment and then reached for the phone.

'But what's he
done}'
Betty Summers asked, helplessly aware that her voice was rising towards hysteria. The taller policeman (at least, Betty supposed they were policemen - she hadn't understood the identity cards they'd shown her) said soothingly: 'Your husband has done nothing, Mrs Summers. Please don't worry. Now why don't you just make yourself a cup of tea and we'll wait till he gets home?' His smile was bland, uninformative. 'You could make us one, too, if you like.' - 'But...' 'Just relax, Mrs Summers.'

She straightened a table-runner, unnecessarily, her hand shaking. She didn't believe a word of his reassurance. Phil
must
have been up to something - and now it was catching up on him. He'd been so preoccupied lately, not himself at all. There'd been no secrets between them in four years of marriage, till recently; the last four or five months, perhaps. Then he'd taken to brooding to himself at the oddest times - or worse, being falsely cheerful. . . .

The phone rang and Betty jumped. She moved towards it but the second man reached it before her.

'Yes? . . . No, I'm afraid Mr and Mrs Summers are out this evening. . . . Just a friend. I'll tell them you rang.'

Betty had wanted to call out but she had caught the taller man's warning eye and had been too afraid. Now she managed to ask: 'Who was it?'

'Somebody called Trevor. I'm sorry, Mrs Summers. It has to be this way.'

'Has to be
what
way? Why can't you
tell
me?'

'When your husband comes. He shouldn't be long now, should he?'