Out of Nowhere (4 page)

A pick-up truck and a station wagon – the monastery’s entire transport fleet – stood outside the gate. Both were old but well-kept.

‘We’ll take the pick-up,’ Philip said. ‘It’ll hold more loot.’

There was a trailer holding plastic oil drums attached to the back of the truck. When they climbed into the cab, Stephen was startled to see a double-barrelled shotgun secured by clips to the top of the backrest.

‘You keep guns here?’ he asked Philip.

‘We use them to scare off vermin in the fields. We’re not allowed to kill them, believe it or not.’

Stephen didn’t like the gun. He liked it even less when Philip broke it open, took the cartridges out and replaced them with fresh ones.

‘Why are you doing that?’ Stephen asked.

‘There’s only birdshot in the old ones,’ Philip said. ‘These new ones will pack a wee bit more punch.’

‘Are you expecting danger?’

The monk eyed him thoughtfully.

‘It never hurts to be prepared,’ he replied.

As they drove off, Stephen looked back at the monastery. From the outside, it looked more like a fort than a house of
religion. Seeing him looking, Kirsten told him it was very old. It had been abandoned for centuries before the monks revived it.

Stephen could see the new stonework where the walls had been restored. The abbey lay in the heart of the mountains, standing on the crest of a low hill that was dwarfed by surrounding peaks. The top of the hill – it was hardly more than a mound – was almost flat, and on the gentle slopes outside the abbey walls an orchard of young apple trees shared space with wilder growth. A gravelled roadway led down from the gates, bridging a stream at the foot of the mound. As they crossed it, Philip pointed out the screen of evergreens hiding the little mountain lake from which the stream flowed. The lake was fed by the same underground springs as the monastery well. Philip explained that the little lake had been famous as a holy place long before Christianity existed. Its waters were believed to cure sickness, and even during the centuries of the monastery’s ruin it had been visited for religious and superstitious reasons by local peasants.

‘There’s a thorn bush by the lake,’ Philip said, ‘and we still find offerings of rags tied to it sometimes. You never see anyone there, but you find the rags.’

The hills here weren’t altogether bare, but they weren’t cultivated either. It was a wild landscape. Stephen remembered that the monks had a farm, but he could see no sign of it. He asked Philip where the monastery fields were. Philip laughed.

‘Bless you, boy,’ he said, ‘they’re not up here! We bought land, but there was no chance of getting it all in one piece,
never mind getting it nearby. Land in these mountains is largely useless – unless you’re a goat. Good land is scarce in these parts, so people hold on to it for generations. No, the monastery fields are scattered for miles – I think there’s only two that border on each other. I only thank God that this didn’t happen during the harvest – we’d never have coped.’

They’d turned from the gravelled track out on to a small dirt road. Stephen sat in silence for a while, looking out. The countryside did look empty, but then it looked like the kind of land that would be empty at the best of times. Millennia of storms from the Atlantic had washed most of the thin soil from the rocks. He saw why Philip had laughed at his question, this wasn’t crop land, nor even grazing land – it was barren wilderness.

‘It must be really weird out here now,’ he said.

‘No so much around here,’ Philip said. ‘Or at least no more than usual. Around here it’s always this empty. But it felt very strange in the village we visited. Very strange altogether.’

‘Strange?’

‘Empty. It was empty. All the houses open, all the peoples’ belongings still there – even their clothes.’

‘Their clothes?’

‘It looks like they all left in the middle of the night, dressed in whatever they slept in. It’s like they all just … vanished.’

Once they’d left the steepest, rawest hills behind they did start to pass a few cultivated fields. They even started to see living things apart from birds: a few rough mountain sheep at first and then, as the land improved, cattle. Through the open windows of the little truck Stephen heard a new sound, the
first noise he’d heard apart from the sound of the truck itself. It was a strange pained lowing, an uncanny thing. Stephen thought of the old man’s howling the night before.

‘That’s the cattle,’ Philip said, seeing his puzzled look. ‘They haven’t been milked for days, and they don’t like it. But there’s nothing we can do for them – there’s just too many and they’re too scattered.’

They began to pass the occasional house now, small
cottages
and bungalows, or farmhouses with yards and outbuildings. After a while they turned off the little road on to a larger one. At the junction of the two roads stood several buildings, one of them a pub. The doors of the bar stood wide open to the weather.

‘Look at that,’ Philip said. ‘There’s proof that something very strange is going on – what Irish publican would leave his doors open like that?’

The new road brought them out of the mountains and through a series of dwindling hills. Still the vast emptiness went on. They saw all sorts of animals, but no people.

‘It’s weird,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s just … weird. But at the same time it seems almost exciting. You feel you could do
anything
!’

‘Yes,’ Kirsten said. ‘You’re right. But it’s all so scary – the emptiness.’

Philip smiled.

‘Some people in the abbey,’ he said, ‘would think this was an improvement.’

‘Like who?’

‘Brother Simon, for instance.’

‘Simon? But he’s very polite. A bit sour maybe.’ She looked
at Stephen. ‘Have you met him yet?’

Stephen supposed that, since there were only three monks, Simon must be the older monk who’d first found him awake.

‘Seen,’ he said. ‘Not met.’

Philip laughed.

‘Just as he’d like it,’ he said. ‘He’s not overly fond of people. Or at least, he doesn’t think much of them. Mind you, he has little cause to.’

‘What happened to him?’ Kirsten asked.

Philip thought for a while before answering.

‘Do you know anything about our order?’ he asked.

‘Only what you’ve told me,’ Kirsten said. ‘That it’s a multi-faith lay order founded after the last world war.’

‘Yes. But it’s more than just multi-faith – it’s made up of all faiths and none. We have humanists, agnostics and atheists, the lot. And the order wasn’t just set up
after
the war, it was set up in large part
because
of it – as a reaction to its horrors. By now, they have a whole string of monasteries scattered across the emptier parts of Europe, several in America, even a couple in North Africa. They buy old, ruined monasteries when they can and restore them. It’s by no means a poor order, though we all live simply.’

‘Where does the money come from?’ Stephen asked.

‘Bequests and gifts, mainly. Some of the richest European families send their sons to the monks for a few years of the contemplative life before they go “out in the world”, as the order calls it. But what I was going to say is that the order wasn’t always rich. When it was first set up, it was a terrible time in Europe. The whole continent was in ruins, and not
just physically. People had found out about the things the Nazis did – the camps, the genocide. Evil, as Paul explained it to me, wasn’t just a word anymore. Evil had a name and a face, and often it was your neighbour’s face, or your brother’s. Our order was founded by people who wanted to think about that, to make sense of it. Men joined for a few years or for a lifetime. When you meet some of the original monks – Simon is one – they’re people who lived through terrible things. Simon was in the Dutch resistance and he had some very nasty exper- iences as a result of his involvement. He was betrayed by his own family, and he was tortured.’

‘But what do the monks actually
do
?’ Stephen asked. ‘Set up abbeys in wild places and … think about evil?’

‘Well, yes, basically that’s exactly what we do.’

‘And you? Where do you fit into this? Are you the son of a rich family?’

Philip hesitated.

‘No,’ he said finally, ‘no, I’m not. You might say I’m an experiment of Paul’s. I–’

Suddenly Philip braked hard, throwing the truck into a skid. The trailer slewed violently. When the truck came to a stop, Kirsten and Stephen stared at Philip, whose hands had gone white on the wheel. He, in turn, stared fixedly out of the driver’s side-window.

‘What is it?’ Kirsten demanded.

Philip ignored her. His hand disappeared among the folds of his habit and drew out a big black pistol. Stephen felt the hairs on his neck twitch as he stared at the gun. He could understand that the monks might keep shotguns to frighten
off vermin, but this was a weapon that no monk should ever have a use for. It was a tool for killing.

Philip opened the door of the truck and began to get out. He glanced back at them, his face icy. The change in him was complete.

‘Stay here,’ he said tightly. There were no laughs now. He got out, leaving the door open behind him, and set off back down the road. Stephen and Kirsten exchanged a look. Then, without saying a word, they both followed, Stephen hurrying, Kirsten reluctant.

When Stephen reached Philip he was standing in front of a five-barred wooden gate, staring into the field beyond. The pistol hung forgotten in his hand. When Stephen’s eyes followed the big monk’s stare he saw what Philip’s sharp eyes had spotted in passing – a bright patch of colour on the grass. Stephen had an awful suspicion that he knew what he was looking at. He heard Kirsten’s light footfalls on the roadway behind him.

‘Fräulein Herzenweg doesn’t need to see this,’ Philip said quietly. His voice was flat and strained. The patch of colour might have been a bundle of old rags, but it lay in a suspiciously human-looking mound. A white top, jeans and white skin where a face and two hands should be. The bundle was surrounded by a swarming cloud of flies.

Stephen turned away just as Kirsten reached him. He put himself between her and the gate and grabbed her arms.

‘Philip wants us back in the truck,’ he said.

Kirsten stared over his shoulder into the field. Her face was white and he could feel her trembling.

‘That’s a body,’ she said. ‘A person.’

‘Come on,’ Stephen said. ‘We can do no good here.’

She let him lead her slowly back along the road. Kirsten walked like a robot, guided by his arms around her shoulders.
He felt goosebumps on her bare arms where his hands touched her skin. She was ice-cold in the summer heat. When they got to the pick-up she got in and sat there, staring straight ahead, hugging her knees, making no sound. Stephen felt he should at least try to say something comforting, but he couldn’t think of anything. He was sorry about that, he could have used a bit of comfort himself.

Suddenly, sitting there in the bright sunlight, Stephen wasn’t sure whether any of this was really happening. He no longer knew what was real and what was not. It all seemed impossible. He half-expected the whole scene to disappear, like the image of Kirsten by the well. He reached out and touched the round edges of the dashboard, feeling the smooth plastic surface with his fingertips. It felt dull enough to be real.

‘Have you wondered,’ he asked Kirsten, ‘whether you might be dreaming all this?’

She looked at him. He was embarrassed. It sounded stupid when you said it out loud – though no more stupid, really, than the notion that everyone else in the entire world had somehow just
disappeared
.

‘Right now I wish that I was,’ she said. ‘But we can’t
both
be dreaming it. If I’m dreaming it then none of you are real. And if
you’re
dreaming it …’

She stopped short.

‘That could have been me in that field!’ she burst out. ‘Or you!’

She shook her head.

‘It’s too crazy!’ she said. ‘It’s all too crazy!’

She buried her head in her knees and started to sob. Her
shoulders shook. It was hard to believe that this terrified child was the same happy girl who’d set out so excitedly this morning. Then she’d been hungry to see what might be out here in this brave new world. Now she’d seen it. She had seen that the new world had teeth and claws, and used them.

‘Maybe it was an accident or something,’ Stephen said weakly.

Kirsten shook her head without raising it.

‘You know that’s not so,’ her muffled voice said. ‘Something is out here. Something dangerous. And we’re out here, too.’

Stephen felt he should put his arm around her or something – try to comfort her somehow. But he felt shy about doing it, and he couldn’t think of anything comforting to say that wouldn’t be a barefaced lie. So they both sat there, miserably. After a while, Kirsten stopped crying.

‘I’m being childish,’ she said firmly. ‘Whatever is happening, crying won’t help. We have to be sensible.’

She dried her eyes with a big, white handkerchief she pulled from her sleeve.

Philip returned and called Stephen. He looked dazed and appalled. There was no sign of the big pistol now. Philip brought Stephen to the back of the truck and spoke in low tones that Kirsten couldn’t hear.

‘I may as well tell you now,’ he said. ‘It was a man. He’s been killed.’

‘By animals?’

‘You could say that, but they walked on two legs. They were human – after their fashion.’

Stephen looked at him.

‘We can’t just leave him lying there,’ Philip said. ‘We need to bury him. We have shovels here in the truck. But I’ll be all day digging a proper grave on my own.’

‘I’ll help you,’ Stephen said.

‘Good man. I hoped you’d offer. But I have to warn you, he’s not a pretty sight. Whoever killed him enjoyed the work. They liked hurting people.’

Stephen felt his stomach churning.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I’ll still do it. It’s like you say – we can’t just leave him there.’

Philip looked at him steadily, then nodded again.

‘Good,’ he said.

There was a recessed handle in the floor of the pick-up truck. Philip pulled it up to reveal a storage compartment for tools. He took out two broad-bladed shovels and handed one to Stephen.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said, ‘before we lose our nerve.’

But it didn’t come to that – at least, not in the way Philip meant. What happened instead was, if possible, even more unnerving.

When they got to the gate Stephen avoided looking into the field. He was afraid of what he’d see. He knew he’d have to look at it, but he didn’t want to see it any sooner than he had to.

Philip started to climb over the gate, but then stopped.

‘God almighty,’ he breathed.

In spite of himself, Stephen looked. There was nothing to see. The place where the body had been was empty. Philip jumped down inside the field and ran to the spot, with Stephen
following. Philip stared around, wild-eyed, unable to speak. The long grass should at least have been crushed where the body had lain, but it wasn’t. There was no sign that anything heavier than the air had pressed it down. Even the flies were gone. Philip let out a long, hissing breath between his teeth. He whimpered like a child. His eyes rolled, frightened and frightening, in his head. He was a terrified man. Stephen knew exactly how he felt.

‘Oh my sweet saviour!’ Philip hissed. ‘What devil’s work is this?’