‘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.
‘I’ll have to jack up the front for a while,’ he said. ‘But see if you can do something to fix up his arm.’
He took the spare tyre from the boot, and began to change the front wheel whose tyre had blown. He was not quite sure why it should suddenly be as important to him to look after Oakley as it was to look after Beth. But he knew that there was a lot to be done.
FIN
About Susan Cooper
Cooper was born in 1935 in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to John Richard Cooper and his wife Ethel Maybelle, nee Field. Her father had worked in the reading room of the Natural History Museum until going off to fight in the First World War, from which he returned with a wounded leg. He then pursued a career in the offices of the Great Western Railway. Her mother was a teacher of ten-year-olds and eventually became deputy head of a large school. Her younger brother Roderick also grew up to become a writer.
Cooper lived in Buckinghamshire, until she was 21, when her parents moved to her grandmother’s village of Aberdovey in Wales. She attended Slough High School and then earned a degree in English from the University of Oxford, where she was the first woman to edit the undergraduate newspaper Cherwell.
After graduating, she worked as
a reporter for The Sunday Times (London) under Ian Fleming, and wrote in her spare time. During that period she began work on the series The Dark Is Rising and finished her debut novel, the science fiction Mandrake, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1964.
Cooper emigrated to the United States in 1963 to marry Nicholas J. Grant, Professor of Metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a widower with three teenage children. She had two children with him, Jonathan Roderick Howard Grant (b. 1965) and Katharine Mary Grant (b. 1966; later Katharine Glennon). She then became a full-time writer, focusing on The Dark Is Rising and on Dawn of Fear (1970), a novel based on her experiences of the Second World War. Eventually she wrote fiction for both children and adults, a series of picture books, film screenplays, and works for the stage.
Bibliography
Novels
The Dark Is Rising
Over Sea, Under Stone (1965)
The Dark Is Rising (1973)
Greenwitch (1974)
The Grey King (1975)
Silver on the Tree (1977)
Other
Mandrake (Hodder & Stoughton, 1964), science fiction for adults
Dawn of Fear (1970), autobiographical World War II story
Seaward (1983)
The Boggart (1993)
The Boggart and the Monster (1997)
King of Shadows (1999)
Green Boy (2002)
Victory (June 2006)
Ghost Hawk (2013)
Illustrated Children’s Books
Jethro and the Jumbie (1979)
The Silver Cow: A Welsh Tale (1983), retold
The Selkie Girl (1986), the Selkie legend retold
Matthew’s Dragon (1991)
Tam Lin (1991), retold
Danny and the Kings (1993)
Frog (2002)
The Magician’s Boy (2005), adapting her short play for the 1988 Revels
Susan Cooper, Mandrake
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