Max Gilbert

  Mark spoke. "And that's when I met them. I was apprenticed to a merchant ship, the Mary-Anne. They hijacked her. Butchered most of the crew and forced the rest to sail for England. God knows what they had been hired to do here."

  "But they never made it," said Chris.

  "Correct." Mark's dark eyes bled pain. "I scuttled the Mary-Anne. The Saf Dar, my crewmates, they all went to the bottom of the sea not half a mile from here. I was the only survivor."

  Understanding hit Chris.

  "Look..." Mark's voice was laced with urgency. "I see it plain and simple. Any time now there's going to be an almighty great chunk of power that no one's seen in five hundred years come whistling into this place. ... Then it's going to be a case of who grabs it first. Us, or those bastards on the beach. Because we're like two teams in a line-out, waiting for that ball of magic that's going to be chucked into Manshead. Whoever catches the ball first is the winner, the other loses. And I'm talking about absolute winners and absolute losers. Chris, Ruth, those things out there are our rivals. They want this power first. If they could, they'd kill us now, then turn us into things like Wainwright, Fox, and the others out there. That way we wouldn't be in competition with them for that power surge when it comes. And believe me, if they get hold of that power they can do anything. These stone walls might as well be made out of paper. We wouldn't even have the choice of dying. We would become their foot soldiers. We would be marched off inland to kill anyone who gets in our way. Those that we killed would become like us. You can imagine it as a cancer spreading, spreading across the country."

  Ruth said to Tony, "How long have we got? Before this force breaks through?"

  "No more than two to three days. You've probably felt it yourself, a kind of tension building. All the signs are there. Already the barrier between this world and that other place is stretched so tight that the magic, supernatural force-manna, cosmic power, whatever you want to call it-is leaking through. It's strongest in these few hundred square yards around Manshead. If you like, we're at ground zero. Living things are being altered or affected by it. It's turned up the life energy already, a bit like increasing the volume of a radio. If you're ill you feel better; if you're tired you feel stronger."

  All at once Chris thought of his tireless work on the sea-fort, the goldfish, the monster celery plant. ... Christ, those shells David had picked up two weeks ago.

  Mark's grip on the shotgun tightened. "And sometimes things that die... they come back. For a while this is going to be the only place on earth where even death has died."

  "The goldfish," whispered Ruth. "You remember, Chris?"

  Tony leaned forward. "You've seen things?"

  Mark pulled something from his breast pocket and handed it to Chris. "And you might have seen one of these."

  It was a common cockleshell. He knew what it would have on its concave surface.

  "A face," said Ruth. "A picture of a face."

  "The beach is littered with them," said Mark. "There's probably-shit..."

  Mark stood up quickly, the shotgun in his hands.

  Without warning the light-bulb had gone out. Even above the distant pounding on the sea-fort gates, they heard it clicking as the glass cooled. The room, gloomy with only the weak daylight filtering through dirty glass, felt inexplicably cold.

  "Could be the fuses. ..."

  "Fuses be buggered," said Tony. "I'm only surprised they didn't do it earlier. The sea-fort supply comes from a cable strung on pylons along the coast road. It would have been simple enough to bring it down."

  Shit! thought Chris fiercely. Food running low ... Electricity off. We're down to candles. What could they...

  "Water." Chris looked up sharply. "Next they cut the water."

  "More difficult. They'd have to dig down through the-"

  "No, would they shit. ... There's a stop-cock on the landward side of the causeway. All they need do is flip open the iron cover, reach down and turn a tap. Then ..."

  "Damn. The bastards will soon work that one out."

  Ruth stood up quickly. "We'll get as many containers together as we can. Pans, buckets, bottles. Fill them full of water."

  Mark walked to the door. "I'll get some help."

  As he walked to the door, Chris saw a figure move quickly back. He recognized that dried-up profile. The Reverend Reed; he'd been eavesdropping.

  When Ruth and Mark had gone, their feet echoing away down the stone corridor, Chris turned to Tony and asked, "Are we going to make it through this?"

  "I hope so, Chris. ... God knows, I hope so."

  Chapter Thirty-three

  "Miz-zess Stainforth! Miz-zess Stainforth ... Toilet won't flush."

  Rosie Tamworth stood in the doorway of the caravan, her little-girl face on top of the lumpy body showing childish concern. Ruth, who was carrying buckets of water across the courtyard with Chris, stopped and looked at him. Her eyes said it all.

  He put his buckets down on the cobblestones. "So the bastards worked it out at last. No electricity. No water." The mental clock that measured the time they could remain in the sea-fort began to tick more quickly. A human being can last five weeks without food. Without water you are talking days.

  He picked up the buckets and carried them to where they were storing half a dozen other buckets, twenty-three bottles of all different kinds, two plastic washing-up bowls, pans, ornamental vases, plastic boxes-all filled to the brim with water. Tony had suggested that they line wooden crates with plastic sheeting to make their own containers; however, they had simply run out of time. Somewhere out on the causeway a hand had reached down into a hole in the road and twisted shut the stop-cock.

  Again he thought of those monstrously powerful hands. Again he thought of David's neck. He snapped off the line of thought and went to find Tony.

  As Chris climbed the steps after locking the water-store door, the sound of the pounding on the gates connected with his consciousness again. He realized it had never stopped, but in the rush to save as much water as possible he'd successfully shut it out.

  Now it came back. It sounded as if death itself was at the gate, pounding, pounding, pounding. And it wanted to come inside.

  On the wall walkway stood Mark, carrying the shotgun, and Tony. Both peered over the wall, hypnotised by the sight of the creature, hacking at the timber gates with a rock.

  It had used several rocks. Splinters of stone littered the causeway around the gate. The sea, now at high tide, swirled and sucked thickly around the slab of rock that was their island. More Saf Dar sat waist-deep in surf on the causeway. Beyond that, green sea vanished into gray mist.

  "I expect you've heard," said Chris.

  Mark continued to stare, brooding, at the figure thumping the timbers with the rock.

  Tony turned round, his face as gray as the fog. "The Hodgson lad told us."

  "What now?"

  "Just wait. That's all we can do. Unless you've got any ideas. There's no way we can contact anyone in the outside world. We can't run. Wainwright proved that. We can't fly out."

  "I heard the pub landlord talking to one of the other villagers," said Chris. "They thought they might be able to make a raft and paddle out."

  "They were fucking joking, weren't they?"

  "They're desperate, Tony. They know there isn't much food and we've only got enough water for a few days and so-"

  "And so they thought they might as well kill themselves; get it over with quick. Mark, how many of the Saf Dar were there on the Mary-Anne when she went down?"

  Mark didn't look round. "Fifteen." Those brooding eyes were fixed on the thing battering the door. He gripped the shotgun so tightly the veins in the back of his big hands pressed out against the skin.

  "Fifteen... The most we've seen on the causeway is eight. That means there's probably another seven scattered around this place. One or two up in the dunes. One guarding the bridge near the village. And maybe a couple sitting under the water out there, ready to reach up and tip anyone into
the sea if they are bleeding stupid enough to try and float out on a raft."

  "Tony, do you think the villagers are just going to sit here and starve?" He spaced the words so the machinelike pounding, rock against wood, filled the gaps between his words. "Mr and Mrs Hodgson have two sons; some men have wives. This instinct to survive, to protect your family from danger, is surfacing. They have to feel as though they're doing something. If we all sit here listening to that thing cracking away at the door we're all going to go mad. If we can't do anything to stop the noise we might as well-"

  The tremendous bang came at the wrong time. The thing had changed its rhythm. Chris looked round.

  Mark stood on tiptoe leaning forward over the wall, the shotgun up at his shoulder. From one of the barrels a cloud of blue smoke rolled outward.

  For maybe five seconds the pounding stopped. The sudden silence became almost unbearable.

  Chris quickly leaned forward over the wall to look down.

  The thing with the rock still stood on the causeway immediately outside the twin gates. It had paused. The arm held high, frozen in mid-hammer, still grasped the white pebble in its massive paw. The hairless head still faced the gates, its eyes glittering white in the red face.

  Chris stared down until his eyes watered. There was something different about the monster, it had-

  That's it!

  Running down from the shoulder, down its red back knotted with veins, was a thick liquid, the consistency of rich gravy.

  Blood.

  Heart beating hard, Chris looked swiftly at Tony to see if he'd grasped the significance of the liquid hemorrhaging from a jagged break in the thing's shoulder.

  Then the huge arm came down, cracking the stone against the gate. The mechanical pounding had begun once more. Bang-one-two-bang-one-two ... A handful of speeding lead shot hadn't stopped it long. But there on Manshead a small miracle had taken place.

  "Christ, these things actually bleed," whispered Chris.

  "Sure they do," said Mark in a low, controlled voice. "And if they do ..."

  Raising the shotgun to his shoulder, he aimed, every gram of concentration squeezed into his eyes as he looked unblinking down the barrel. His trigger finger tightened.

  Again the explosion from the shotgun punched Chris's eardrum-but he never took his eyes off the figure pounding the gates.

  This time the shot hit the creature square, knocking it away from the door with enough force to make you believe it had been dynamited away. The momentum carried it back five feet across the causeway, its arms windmilling loosely over its head. Then it fell back into the blanket of foam.

  A wave rolled around the sea-fort and the bastard creature was gone.

  For a moment they stared down. Gone. The gun smoked. Gone. Mark's eyes glistened with tears, whether from the gunsmoke or what Chris didn't know-but he felt his spirits lifting.

  Gone. All that remained was the big white pebble smeared with that black gunge that had oozed from the bastard monster's body.

  Jesus. These things bleed. They actually bleed. The words buzzed like lightning through his head.

  Now the creature lay at the bottom of the sea with a hole in its chest big enough to plant a tree in.

  He looked out at its brothers. Three were visible on the causeway. They sat immobile, expressionless. Sunburn-red bodies splashed by waves from the rising tide. Did they know that one of their kind had just been blown from the surface of God's earth? Did the moronic fuckers care?

  From his right came a shrieking sound. It was a Hodgson boy, jumping up and down as high as his lard-arse would allow. He whooped again, his freckled face ecstatic. Then he ran to the steps whooping and shouting: "Dad! Mr Faust killed one of them things. Dad!"

  Tony was grinning and shaking his head as if he'd just seen Father Christmas plop down his chimney.

  Chris let out a huge breath. He felt as if he'd been holding it for the last forty-eight hours.

  At last they knew. These things bled. They hurt. And they died.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Within minutes a dozen or more people crowded onto the walkway to look down at the bloody pebble on the causeway or to slap Mark Faust on the back. At that moment the villagers would have given him everything they owned.

  "Looks like you're a bloody hero," called Tony over the congratulations.

  "Should've done it sooner," Mark replied with one of his broad grins. "Just never thought a shooter would do a thing against them."

  "Let the dog see the bloody rabbits, then." Hodgson Senior hoisted his bulk up against the wall, the shotgun in his well-padded hands.

  "Make way for a little 'un." Tom Hodgson joined his brother, rolling his shirt-sleeves up his freckled arms. The two of them leaned forward against the wall, plump elbows resting on the stone, aiming the shotguns. The Saf Dar sat in a group fifty paces away on the causeway.

  They fired quickly. The shot at this distance spread enough to hit all four of the things as well as splashing the water around them.

  Each shot brought a slight flinch from the figures, but they did not relax their statue-like pose. Nor did they blink their eyes which still glittered like glass in their faces.

  As the echoes of gunfire crackled away into the distance, the Hodgsons pulled more shells from their pockets and blasted the creatures again.

  Chris knew it would be too much to hope for. But he longed for the bastard creatures to explode into the shit they were and simply be washed away forever by the tide.

  He glanced back into the courtyard. Ruth stood, her arms around David. Chris waved to catch their attention.

  She looked up.

  He grinned and gave a thumbs-up sign. She nodded and smiled back, relieved. They were going to be all right. He was going to call down, but a deafening battery of crashes came from the Hodgsons' guns as they pounded the figures on the causeway.

  He turned to see the figures moving back.

  It wasn't exactly a rout. They moved back in an unhurried way like men casually seeking the shade of a bigger tree. But they were moving. And in the right direction.

  Tony called out, "All right, lads. Save your ammo. They're out of range."

  The two farmers stopped firing. "Pity the cunts weren't a bit nearer. We'd have turned the fuckers into pig-shit."

  "No ... We didn't even wing 'em, Tom."

  Mark's voice rumbled, excited. "That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter a shit. What does matter is that we can hurt them."

  Chris realized, feeling the same flash of excitement, that Mark had got the scent of his prey. Now the hunter, not the hunted.

  Mark said: "Whatever those bastards are, they are flesh and blood. We wait till they come back. Then we hit them hard."

  Chapter Thirty-five

  "Fill it right to the top?" asked Ruth, slipping the funnel spout into the neck of a bottle.

  "Half," Mark told her. "It'll be easier to handle. Also we still need to mix in the soap powder."