Max Gilbert

  Chris had been shifting junk in one of the store rooms, looking for an axe-head to hammer onto the shaft he had armed himself with. That's when he saw the thing on the wall.

  Despite his exhaustion he had shot backwards from a crouching position like an athlete.

  "Jesus Christ."

  With an involuntary movement of disgust he covered his face with his hands. Then, swallowing down the unpleasant taste in his mouth, he looked again.

  There, stuck to the wall, was a cluster of growths the color and texture of white cheese, the largest the size of a dinner plate.

  What the growths actually were he did not know. But he knew what they looked like.

  Clinging there, to the stone wall, just inches away from him, was a human face.

  Later, he sat on the caravan steps, tapping nails into the end of the axe-handle. He'd not been able to find an axehead but he'd found a huge hammer-head caked in rust and mold. Its solid cast-iron weight, as big as two fists side by side, felt reassuring. Ruth leaned against the caravan wall, a cardigan around her shoulders against the chill night air. They talked in half-whispers.

  "What are we going to do, Chris? David's six years old. He's just a baby."

  He said nothing; he tapped another nail into the end of the shaft to secure the hammer-head.

  "Chris, we can't go on like this. Have you seen how much water is left in-"

  "I know, Ruth. I know ... I've tried to talk to Mark and Tony. I said we needed to rig up some apparatus so we can distil fresh water from sea water."

  "And what did they say?"

  "Sod all. Mark's retreated into himself-depressed. He blames himself for not being able to kill those things out there. Gateman seems content to sit and wait for some kind of supernatural cavalry to come charging across the sand."

  "And what do you think, Chris?"

  "As Mark said when-if-it comes, this supernatural power, the first to grab it is going to be the winner."

  "But we don't know how to do that."

  "By sacrifice, according to Tony. We give something so we can get something in return. In this case that bucketful of miracles Gateman goes on about."

  "What do we sacrifice?"

  "Search me."

  "Has Tony said anymore about this sacrifice thing, Chris?"

  Chris turned around to look at her, standing there in the near-dark. He could no longer see her face, but he sensed something immense troubling her. She wasn't asking him these questions because she didn't know what Tony had said; she knew well enough. He realized that his wife was using the questions to direct his train of thought.

  Sacrifice.

  It always came back to that. As if sacrifice was the only solution. Sacrifice. It was unthinkable. He could not even accept the idea of it. It was as if his mind were a computer into which someone was struggling to insert a new programme. It refused the reprogramming. This mind would not load that barbaric concept. It belonged in the tomb with those long-dead men and women who had practiced it.

  Chris changed the subject.

  "Is David asleep?"

  "He should be. I left him looking at a comic, but he's exhausted."

  His wife pulled the cardigan closer around her shoulders and shivered. "Perhaps someone will come, Chris. It's Monday tomorrow. There have to be deliveries to the village. It's not as if we're on an island."

  No, we're not an island, thought Chris, but for all the contact we have with the outside world we might as well be on the dark side of the fucking moon.

  He tapped the final nail into the wood.

  Chapter Forty-one

  "Oh God! Get it away, get it away!"

  Screaming.

  "God! Oh God, oh God, oh God, God, God, God... Please ... Oh-oh ..."

  Ruth was first to reach the screaming woman as she ran from the sea-fort building. Immediately she stopped screaming but clutched the side of her head and sobbed breathlessly.

  Chris didn't know the woman's name; she was in her mid-fifties, very thin, with tied-back gray hair.

  A couple of the other villagers came to see the cause of the commotion, but significantly most didn't bother to rouse themselves from their apathetic slumbers.

  Tony Gateman, who had been standing on top of the wall, came puffing down the steps, his face red beneath the thickening stubble on his cheeks.

  "What happened?"

  "I'm not sure," said Ruth, holding the sobbing woman.

  Chris immediately thought the woman had found someone who had succeeded in committing suicide, but all she could pant out was that she'd seen something.

  "Get her into the caravan." Ruth sounded in control. "We'll get her a drink. ... She's calming down now."

  Ten minutes later, a blanket around her shoulders, cupping a steaming mug of tea in her hands, she was able to talk.

  She had been to the toilet, one of the old ones in the sea-fort building. When she had finished she had looked down into the bowl as she got ready to pour down a jug of sea-water to flush it. The waste from the toilets simply discharged via a wide-bore pipe straight into the sea.

  What she had seen there had nearly paralyzed her heart.

  Squeezing up around the U-bend as tightly as a rat squeezing through a piece of hose had been a human face. Chris imagined a flat, expressionless face squeezing up through the hole through three pints of water and urine in the bottom of the bowl.

  It had been the strange, flattened face of a girl, its eyes as dull as those of a dead fish on a slab.

  She hadn't remembered much after that.

  Later, Tony had muttered, "Hysterical. Seen her reflection in her own piss."

  Chris knew that Tony had himself been unconvinced by this explanation. The woman had seen something. And he remembered what he had seen in the old store room. The face glued there to the wall.

  He had bitten back the foul taste of bile in his mouth and pulled together enough resolve to examine it. The white stuff (he guessed it to be a fungus) had grown in the shape of a human face. A smooth white man's forehead, two eyes-lightly closed like a sleeper's- smoothly sculpted nose, two even lips. He recalled the marble heads of Greek gods.

  Surrounding it was a constellation of other white blobs, each one a clone-line copy of the large face, right down to the ones the size of a little fingernail. High white forehead, eyes, nose, lips. A dozen perfect white faces.

  As he watched, he had noticed a faint shiver. They were alive.

  When Mrs. Hodgson came to sit with the woman, Ruth and Chris went up to the toilet the woman had used. He carried the massive hammer in one hand.

  The white-washed room, bare apart from the old china high-flush toilet, looked normal. In one corner lay the plastic jug and a pool of sea water was spreading across the stone slabs.

  But no face.

  A prickle of goosebumps rashed across his skin. He thought about the pathetic bastard on the beach; a mixture of shellfish and human, crushed together then fired into an agonizing kind of life. Maybe out there under the sea near the outflow pipe someone had drowned by the lair of an eel. One of those thick-bodied congers. He imagined a human head mashed together with the conger body, thicker than a man's neck. He thought about the long snake-like body worming up through the sewage pipe.

  Quickly he picked up a bucket of sea-water and dumped it onto the piss in the white bowl. On top of that he poured half a bottle of bleach. Then he and his wife walked quickly away without looking back.

  Midday. Chris restlessly paced the walkway running around the top of the wall when he heard the noise.

  He immediately ran to the point where the wall passed over the gates and peered into the mist. The tide had begun its inward roll once more. Waves frothed around the base of the sea-fort and along the flanks of the causeway, but the causeway itself was still dry.

  The sound went as quickly as it had begun. He couldn't be sure what it was, muffled as it had been by the banks of dunes. He leaned forward. Below, on the ledge of rock that extended a yard or so beyond
the walls, stood eight reddish figures. They were doing nothing- just following the old statue routine.

  He looked back down into the courtyard. No one about. Everyone it seemed had slipped back into their navel-contemplating mode after a lunch that was getting smaller each day.

  The sound came again, a high wailing, swelling then falling across the dunes, growing louder. It was ...

  It was a motor. A car. He leaned forward, craning his head to one side to scoop more of the thin sound into his ear.

  A car. A bloody car! He gripped the wall hard.

  No siren, though. Not police. Maybe the Army. Christ, someone was coming to get them out of this hell. He willed into his mind the image of massive armored personnel carriers lumbering around the coast road and through the gap in the dunes onto the beach.

  He listened hard. The sound of the engine sounded too high-pitched. As if being driven frantically at too high a speed in too low a gear. Surely whoever it was would have to stop at the barrier of pebbles that blocked the coast road.

  No. It got closer. Louder. Someone was coming.

  The mental video clicked on and Chris pictured some terrified postman racing his van along the coast road after coming across Out-Butterwick-deserted, Marie-Celestelike, doors flapping open in the sea breeze.

  No. Not this way. Go back. Bring help.

  The car's engine howled as it powered through the gap in the dunes then skidded sidewards off the road and onto the sand.

  From this distance, the mist fuzzed the lines of the car.

  But he could see that the passenger door was missing.

  That it was a white Ford Fiesta.

  Shit.

  A weight dropped into his stomach.

  Shit, no.

  The car was Wainwright's. The one that had been abandoned in the village's main street. He couldn't see the driver. But he could guess who was at the wheel.

  The sound of the engine being revved ragged rolled down the beach, howling like a beast of burden being flogged until it bled.

  The white car lurched forward, engine shrieking, then stopped again, still on the beach, just feet away from the road that linked the causeway to the coast road.

  "Go away." Understanding began to seep into his mind. "Go away."

  Again the engine howled as the driver crushed the pedal to the carpet. The car pulled to the right then moved slowly forward in a juddering motion. The front wheels, spinning like fury in the loose sand, sent spurts back over the car like the plume from a whale.

  For some reason the yellow hazard lights began to blink on and off like the slow wink of some nightmare lizard, pulsing a blurred yellow through the mist.

  The car juddered across the sand, then, savagely, jerked forward as the front tires bumped up onto the raised roadway.

  For a second he thought the car had stuck there, front wheels screaming in a craze of blue smoke and sand, dragging the car sideways in a useless crab motion.

  "Bog down, you bastard," he hissed, leaning forward, gripping the top of the wall, willing whatever drove the thing to fail. "Bog down!"

  No gods listened to Chris that day.

  With an explosive jerk the rear wheels bumped up onto the roadway. The one-liter engine howled in a painfully high-pitched whine.

  Then the car was moving.

  Really moving this time.

  Horrified, he watched as it blasted along the road, then onto the causeway, yellow hazards flashing, weaving from side to side, bumping across the cobbles like a racing car across a rutted track.

  His mouth dried.

  He stared, unable to move or take his eyes from the ton of steel and rubber and fuel barrelling along the causeway at sixty miles an hour. Blue smoke spurted from the ruptured exhaust. The thing, unsilenced, sounded more like a motorbike wound up to a frenzy of clattering pistons and howling transmission.

  Chris now knew what the Saf Dar intended.

  They had turned Wainwright's car into a battering ram. In ten seconds it would hit the sea-fort gates like a guided missile.

  The Saf Dar waited on the fringe of rock below.

  This was it. Chris chewed his lip. Events were rushing to a climax. He could do nothing. The Saf Dar would flood into the sea-fort grinding the life out of every man, woman and-

  His eyes locked onto the car as it weaved at seventy along the slippery cobbles, the slipstream blasting away clumps of black kelp.

  Oh death, sweet death, where are you now?

  End it... end it... Surely they can't keep even you away forever.

  But the grim reaper had been booted out by something a million times more powerful. Death's a has-been, death's a loser, death's on the dole ...

  These swollen red men are going to rule. ... They won't let us die.

  He watched in a trance, his brain icing.

  There was Wainwright at the wheel of the swaying car, one hand casually on the steering wheel as if driving down to the bank to count money; head rolling loosely from side to side, crimson growths mushrooming from the split in his head, his mouth hanging open as if he'd seen something that had surprised him.

  Then, thank Christ. ... God ... or some age-crusted god from beyond the beyond.

  The car hit a blanket of seaweed and slid, howling madly, to one side.

  Dead Wainwright compensated.

  Over-compensated.

  The car veered to the right across the causeway, clean off the roadway.

  For seconds, whole seconds, the fucking machine flew, tail-end flipping up, lights winking yellow, then splash-

  -it hit the sea, dug down through the skin of salt water, slamming into the sand below. It cartwheeled in a fury of foam and spray; ninety pounds of gouged-up sand and seashells splattered high into the air like a depth-charge explosion; spinning rubber, then--then silence. It lay belly-up in the sea. Cold water steamed from the hot metal; the back wheels still turned but the front wheels had gone, along with most of the engine, radiator and front wings.

  The silence caused by the suddenly killed motor hurt Chris's ears.

  The car had come to a rest alongside the causeway, just twenty paces from the gates.

  Christ, if it had hit... We would have been lucky to last ten minutes.

  He noticed a shape slide away from the wrecked car. And caught a glimpse of white bandage trailing slowly through the surf. However broken up he must be, the Saf Dar weren't letting Wainwright die.

  He'd be back. Along with the rest of them. And the swollen red man-monsters still stood on the rock below.

  "Look," Chris told the half-dozen or so villagers who were peering down at the wrecked car now being washed by the surf. "We need someone up here at all times. Armed." Oil leaking from the cracked motor painted a rainbow sheen on the surface of the water. "If the car had hit those gates, it would have bust them wide open, and ... and to put it bluntly we wouldn't be standing here talking now. Those things down there would have been in to slaughter the rest of us."