Out of Nowhere (8 page)

It was a while before Kirsten came to see him. When she did come she brought a pot of coffee on the now familiar tray. She was obviously upset, though she tried to hide it under a veneer of mock gaiety. But the tell-tale redness was around her eyes.

‘I think we should start charging you for room service,’ she said.

There were two cups on the tray. Stephen’s nostrils flared at the scent of fresh coffee.

‘I didn’t know whether or not to bring food,’ Kirsten said.

‘The coffee smells good, but I’m not hungry.’

He watched her as she poured coffee into the cups. She was pale and tired-looking, her slim shoulders slumped, but she was …
solid
. She was solid, and so was he. There was nothing ghostly about them. And only ghosts and saints and devils, so far as he’d heard, could be in two places at the same time, and he couldn’t believe that either of them was any of those things.

Looking at her scared face, he wondered how he was going to get up the nerve to tell her what had happened. He’d agreed to the abbot’s request without thinking. Now he baulked at the idea of causing her more upset than she’d already endured.

‘We were very lucky yesterday,’ he said.

‘Yes. But I keep thinking, you know … I
killed
someone.’

Stephen hadn’t even thought of the effect of that on her.

‘He was trying to kill you,’ he pointed out.

‘I know. But that doesn’t make it feel any better. I know it sounds stupid, but … that was
his
business. As it happened, I killed him. I didn’t mean to, but still I did and that’s
my
business.’

‘Philip killed three of them. He didn’t seem too disturbed.’

‘I don’t know about that. I wanted to talk to Philip about it, I thought maybe he’d tell me something that would help me feel better. But he shunned me. He wouldn’t even look at me. And you know, Philip has been so nice to me since I came here. I really like him … liked him. But now …’

She waved her hands in a helpless sort of gesture. Her eyes gleamed in the dim light and Stephen had a sudden, terrible feeling that she was going to cry again. He felt flustered.

‘Philip saved our lives,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m sure of that.’

‘I know, I know.’

Stephen felt sorry for her. She’d been so determined to make the best of things. From their first meeting she’d seemed almost relieved by the loss of her past. She’d been born again, flung into a new world full of possibilities. She’d borne up more bravely than he had to a whole series of shocks. Now her cheerful façade had collapsed like a house of cards.

‘It will be all right,’ he lied. ‘We didn’t know how dangerous it could be out there. Next time we’ll be better prepared.’

He knew he was getting no closer to telling her what he’d promised to tell. But how exactly did you go about telling
someone something like that? He doubted he’d ever had any experience of such things in his forgotten life.

Kirsten needed to talk about what had happened in the town, and he let her. As she talked, he understood just how upset she was. She was appalled by the fact that she’d killed someone, whatever the circumstances. She’d got along well with Philip, and she’d hoped for reassurance if not comfort from him. Instead she’d met with something that upset her far more than hostility.

‘After you passed out,’ she said, ‘Philip wanted to leave the library right away. We even abandoned those stupid books we were collecting. We had to carry you to the truck, but Philip seemed reluctant to even touch you. If I hadn’t badgered him I think he’d have left you there. In the end he carried you, though he obviously didn’t like it. He put you in the back of the truck, and I went with you. The trip back was a
nightmare
. Philip drove so recklessly I thought we’d crash, and you were sliding all over the place. I had to keep your head from banging into the sides of the truck-bed, and then I was sliding around too on the corners.’

She was getting upset just talking about it. Her shoulders were clenched tight and her fists were clenched too, the knuckles white.

‘When we got back,’ she said, ‘Philip went off and just left us there. I sat in the back of the truck with your head in my lap and just cried. Simon came to help us in the end. He doesn’t approve of Philip, and he was making all sorts of snide remarks about peasant superstitions. Eventually we got you up here and I went to corner Philip. I found him coming
out of the abbot’s office. He was very gruff. He wouldn’t meet my eyes at all. But I did see his, just for a second, and I couldn’t believe what I saw in them. It was–’

‘Fear,’ Stephen said. ‘You saw fear in them.’

Kirsten stared at him.

‘Yes. But more than that – it was fear of
me
. And I thought …’

Again she gestured helplessly.

‘I don’t know what I thought,’ she said.

‘Have you spoken with the abbot?’

‘He’s talked to me, yes. And Simon has. They tried to reassure me, and they were very kind. Simon even told me that he’s killed people himself, during the war. But I still feel … I feel like a
murderer
. Maybe that’s why Philip is afraid of me.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with that.’

‘No? What does it have to do with then? Why are we suddenly so terrifying?’

Stephen thought of Philip in the field, his wild eyes searching for the vanished body. What had the big monk said then:
What devil’s work is this?
Then he looked at Kirsten, so obviously human. He was going mad himself even to consider such nonsense.

‘You know something I don’t,’ Kirsten said angrily. ‘Don’t you? You know why Philip is afraid.’

Stephen hung his head. He suddenly resented Paul’s request. He felt he’d been given the job of destroying her altogether.

‘I–’ he began.

But he got no further. From outside the drawn curtains
there was a sudden babble of voices, but Stephen couldn’t make out what they were saying. Had someone else wandered in? Or was it an attack by another group of savages?

Then, over the babble, Stephen and Kirsten could hear another sound.

‘That sounds like …’ Kirsten began. Her voice trailed off.

‘It
is
!’ Stephen said.

They ran for the window and snatched back the curtains. It had grown fully light as they talked. Philip came into view, the big pistol in his hand. His face was grim. Behind him came the abbot, empty-handed. They stood in front of the well, staring towards the gateway.

‘Open the gates!’ Philip called in a choked voice.

‘Oh Lord,’ Kirsten said a moment later.

The sound they’d heard was exactly what it sounded like: a car engine. The car drew up in front of Philip and the abbot. Old Brother Simon and Thomas, the novice, came up behind it. Simon held a shotgun; Thomas held what looked like Philip’s little silver pistol. Both aimed their guns squarely at the car. Philip still kept the big automatic hanging limply by his side. His face was white, and devoid of any expression whatsoever.

The babble of voices had yielded to complete silence. Beside him, Stephen heard Kirsten moan a low moan, a whimpering animal sound of pure undiluted terror. He knew the source of that terror, because it was the source of his own – they’d seen the car’s occupants.

There were three men in the car. In the back sat a stout dark-haired man who looked annoyed. In the front were two
slim men in dark suits. One, the driver, was a dour-faced man in a grey hat. He looked to be maybe in his late forties. But it was the third man who inspired terror – the man in the front passenger seat. He was sitting casually, with his torso turned towards the driver, one arm resting on the back of his seat and the other fiddling idly with his tie. Stephen couldn’t say what this man looked like, and he couldn’t say what the man looked like for the same reason that the man inspired such terror. The man in the front seat had no head.

Let’s skip back in time a few days and look at all this from another angle. Let’s take a peek at the bigger picture.

Early one Monday morning in Ireland, a man and a woman woke up in a car. They found they were parked in the middle of a field, and that the car was surrounded by sheep.

The man and the woman were confused. They didn’t recall driving into a field and going asleep. In fact, they didn’t remember going to sleep at all. The last thing they remembered was going home from a dinner-dance late the night before, driving down the dark country roads, longing to be home. And they remembered that – or at least they
thought
they remembered that – quite clearly.

When they got out of the car to look around they were even more puzzled. The field they were in was low-lying and boggy so that the ground was wet even after the fine summer weather. The earth was so soft that even the sheep left hoof-prints in it. Yet there were no tyre-tracks behind the car, no sign that they’d ever actually driven there at all. It was as though the vehicle had been plucked up by a giant hand and then gently deposited here where it was now parked.

The other strange thing was that they couldn’t see any mountains. They’d been driving in their own part of the
country where the mountains were always visible on the horizon at least. Yet here there were none to be seen.

The man and the woman also noticed that their watches had stopped, and stopped at precisely the same time: 3.57am.

The woman grew frightened. The man grew frightened too, but didn’t want the woman to see this. So he tried to look tough. He stared up at the sky, where there was nothing much to see beyond an old crow flapping lazily on its way to nowhere in particular, which must be a special place for crows because they always look as though they’re going there.

‘I’ve seen this kind of thing before,’ the man said.

This came as a surprise to the woman – he’d never struck her as a man who’d had a single odd thing happen to him in his whole life. But it turned out that he meant he’d seen it on television.

‘Mary,’ the man said gravely, ‘I suspect we were abducted by a You Eff Oh.’

‘Lord save us!’ the woman said, and shivered.

Quite a number of people were having odd awakenings that Monday morning, and all of their experiences had several things in common. Firstly, they woke up in places that they knew full well they hadn’t gone to sleep in. Secondly, they were miles from their homes. Thirdly, when they did wake they found themselves dressed in whatever they’d been wearing at about four o’clock that morning: nightclothes, mainly. And fourthly and finally, not one of them could remember a single thing about how they’d got to where they were. They were found wandering the roads by early-morning
travellers, or blundered dazed into half-awake villages and towns, or turned up, scared and bleary-eyed, in the yards of scattered farmhouses. They woke in fields and on top of haystacks. They woke in town squares or parks. They woke – someone soon noticed – in reasonably
safe
places, away from roads, where nothing dangerous would be likely to happen to them while they slept. It was as though someone had deliberately
placed
them. It was all extremely
spooky
, and it got spookier the more you thought about it.

Gradually, as dawn became morning and the country of Ireland woke up, word spread that something very strange had taken place in one of its less populated areas. At the very least a great epidemic of sleepwalking (and in a couple of cases the even stranger sleep
driving
) seemed to have broken out. And as the reports of the sufferers became better known, an even weirder fact became clear: whatever had happened, it had happened in a relatively small area around the mountains to the northwest. Every one of the sufferers either lived in that area or had been passing through it at 4am that morning, when the strange thing – whatever it was – seemed to have taken place.

It soon became clear that in the middle of the previous night, in a corner of Ireland, while nobody was looking, something terribly, terribly odd had taken place. Someone, or something, had evicted all the people. Nobody knew why or how, least of all those who’d been evicted. And naturally everyone was puzzled, because it’s not the sort of thing that happens every day.

Naturally too, the police were interested immediately.
Everybody was. The first reporters arrived in the area within the hour. Strange and garbled and downright foolish reports were broadcast from the northwest itself – because, of course, it hadn’t taken long before people began to wonder what exactly was going on up there, and a few hardy souls had gone to take a look. And soon the rumours flew, and grew as they flew, as rumours will. And then the soldiers started coming, and the helicopters, and by noon the first of the international television crews. Cool-headed shopkeepers in villages close to the centre of events – those villages which still had anyone in them – began to take a longer view of things, and rubbed their hands, and raised their prices, and sat back to wait and watch.

At first the spectators saw only movement, a seething mass of … what? Earth? Water? No. Something alive. Some kind of insect? Ants? A beehive in enormous close-up?

Suddenly the camera zoomed in and the scene on the screen became clearer. There were gasps in the dark room as it became obvious that what they were seeing was a crowd of human beings. But such a crowd! Such a mass of pushing, shoving, clawing humanity! The camera, panning, showed no end to it.

The watchers could make out no details, only the struggling masses. Then the camera zoomed in again, still panning here and there, and they could spot individual areas of the crowd. Here was a large group, led by a figure in black, carrying banners with religious pictures on them. In fact, there were many such religious groups, some of them kneeling, obviously praying, while the crowd surged around them. A knot of orange-robed Krishna devotees banged drums and shook rattles and tambourines as they moved along. There was a tight group of what looked like film cameramen carrying big professional-looking video cameras on their shoulders. There were many different groups, but most of the great crowd seemed made up of individuals. And all of
them, whether singly or in groups, were struggling in the same direction: forward.

‘The numbers have been growing from day one,’ said a voice in the darkness. ‘A trickle of sightseers began as soon as the first news reports were released. That trickle very quickly became a flood, as you can see. The pictures you see here were taken at eleven o’clock last night. The best available estimates put the numbers on the screen at something between fifteen and twenty thousand people. Thousands more will have arrived since then by every available means of transport. They’re coming from all over the world, and our port and airport facilities are already stretched to full capacity. They’ve never seen anything like this: that’s the problem – no one has.’

The speaker’s voice quivered on the final phrase. He cleared his throat.

‘There are gatherings this large or larger,’ he said, ‘at approximately twenty places along the perimeter. There are smaller crowds at an estimated sixteen further locations. All in all we estimate that as of noon today, there were well over half a million people gathered around The Phenomenon.’

The images had been filmed from a helicopter. Now the chopper swirled up and away from the crowd itself, the camera panning again to show the scene behind. Great banks of searchlights shone blinding beams of light, illuminating a gigantic campsite of caravans, marquees and tents, of all sorts of rickety shelters and thousands of sleeping bags thrown on the bare ground. Beside the campsite stood row upon row of mobile chip vans, and a great nomad city of stalls offering everything from fast food to holy relics to tarot card readings.

‘These scenes were filmed at a place called Doulapown,’ the voice said. ‘Until two days ago it had a permanent population of exactly zero and a part-time population composed largely of migratory birds. It now has a tourist information office, seventeen churches and temples based in tents and marquees, twenty illegal bars, two
bureaux de change
and a bank.’

Another voice came from the group of shadows sitting in the darkness. ‘What about crowd control?’

‘Watch.’

The camera panned again, to the front of the crowd this time. You could see that the whole mass was fringed by a thin line of police and soldiers who were struggling to hold it back. They were on a fool’s errand. It was hard to gauge how many of them there were, but compared to the numbers surging forward they were too few to offer more than token resistance. Slowly but surely they were being pushed back.

‘A good rainstorm would do more to clear the area than we can,’ the first voice said. ‘The army and police presence at Doulapown is higher than at any other location on the perimeter. But as you can see, it’s completely ineffective. We have only so many soldiers and policemen, and they do have other duties. Secondment of police from the cities and the larger towns has already led to crime-levels in these reaching crisis point.’

‘What about water-cannon?’ the second voice asked. ‘Tear gas? There are methods, you know.’

This voice was brusque, clipped, American. Several throats were cleared uncomfortably at its words.

‘We’re aware that there are methods,’ the first voice replied.
‘We’re just not entirely comfortable with the idea of using them. Not with publicity being the way it is. You must realise that the Phenomenon is the lead story on every news bulletin on earth right now. Media people in the area probably outnumber clergy.’

‘But you can’t–’ began the American voice. Then, in mid-sentence, it broke into a gasp. The sound was lost in the simultaneous chorus of gasps that broke out in the darkness. Even the Irish government representatives present had trouble containing themselves, though they’d seen the thing before – had been watching pictures of it for two whole days. Some had seen it with their own eyes, and that was even more impressive. The others must have seen pictures of it too, of course, but early shots hadn’t conveyed its sheer…
otherness
.

The camera had continued its pan, past the crowd and past the soldiers. It had come to rest on The Phenomenon itself: vast, beautiful, inexplicable, terrifying, mystifying – and yet, to the eye at least, looking so fragile as to be hardly there.

Ahead of the crowd, lit by the banks of searchlights and the last light of the dying summer sun, an enormous wall of vaguely iridescent purple haze rose from the ground. It went up and up, its summit hidden in clouds. At ground level the haze stretched as far as the eye could see. It was indisputably there, and yet it looked no more substantial than a soap-bubble. It looked like a weather phenomenon, a bizarre trick of the light.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the first voice, which belonged to the Irish Minister for Defence. ‘May I introduce to you the reason
for this meeting – the Bubble, the Barrier, the Purple Haze, call it what you will. The popular press are having competitions to find a name – the front-runner at the moment seems to be The Ball that’s a Wall.’

He paused, as though waiting for a laugh. None came.

‘For our purposes,’ the Minister said, ‘its name is The
Phenomenon
. Its official code-name is Reputation One.’

All eyes lingered on the impossible sight on the screen. The Phenomenon was translucent. Beyond the wall of purple could be seen the empty fields of a completely ordinary Irish countryside.

‘Sightings of animal life beyond the wall of The Phenomenon are common,’ the Minister said. ‘The animals show no signs of unease. That means things inside are at least reasonably normal – there’s air and so on.’

‘Any sightings of humans in there, or … you know… anything
else
?’

‘None that we know of.’

‘Have all the inhabitants of the area been accounted for?’

‘The, um, vast majority of them, yes.’

‘But not all?’

‘No. There’s … an
abbey
in the mountains there. It’s run by a rather peculiar order of monks based in Switzerland.’

‘
Monks
?’

‘Monks. We’ve contacted their headquarters in Berne. They say there should be four monks there in the abbey: a Swiss, a Belgian, an Irishman and a young Frenchman. Noone answering their descriptions has turned up among the displaced persons.’

‘You’ve tried phoning the abbey, I presume?’ someone asked.

The Irish Minister sighed patiently.

‘Yes, we have,’ he said. ‘There was no sound on the line at all. Nothing. There’s no sound on any line leading inside that area. No phonecalls can go in there, no radio signals can go in there, no people can go in there, no vehicles can go in there. To judge from the lack of any artificial light at night-time from anywhere inside, even electricity can’t go in.
Nothing
can go in!’

He looked again to where their eyes were all still fixed – the softly glowing haze on the screen. In the darkness he raised his arm and pointed a slightly shaky finger at the image.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, his voice quivering, ‘someone or something has emptied a part of my country of its people, and put that
thing
there to stop them from returning to their homes. We don’t know who’s done it, and we don’t know why. What we do know is that for several days now a part of Ireland has been seized and occupied, every bit as much as if a foreign army had landed. My country has been invaded, gentlemen, and we’ve asked you here because we badly need your advice.’