A Dusk of Demons

  “They may not have seen us,” I said. To the right there was nothing but heather, but to the left a few patches of brush. “Come on!”

  She shook her head but went with my tugging hand. The first thicket was hopelessly thin, but one twenty yards beyond offered slightly better cover. Paddy had stopped, though, looking back again, and I was forced to do the same. The riders had left the road and were heading across the moor in our direction.

  They were only three or four hundred yards off, shouting at the gallop. Even if I managed to get the gun out and load it, there would be no point. And these had no nest to destroy.

  • • •

  The thin whine, rising and deepening, came from far behind us. I wondered confusedly how a wind could get up so fast on a clear day. Nor could I understand what was happening to the horsemen: Mounts were rearing, voices crying not in triumph but in alarm. A couple of riders fell; others put up their arms, shielding their eyes.

  I turned and was forced to cover my own. A huge thing of fire, shapeless behind a coruscation of shimmering gold, was coming down on us. I remembered Andy: “sweeping out of the sky in a fiery chariot. . . .” The Demons had not waited for Ramsay’s men to get us. They had come for us themselves.

  Something detached from the golden glare, arcing across the sky to burst between us and the panic-stricken horsemen. While I looked they started to blur at the edges, as did heather and road, and the sky itself. My mind wavered with my vision, and I lost hold on both.

  10

  IN MY DREAM I WAS in the kitchen on Old Isle, shelling peas. I could not have been more than three or four years old, because I was sitting on one of the ladder-back chairs and had to reach a foot down to touch the floor. There was a smell of baking, and Mother Ryan was making pastry on the marble-topped table: gathering up dough, powdering it with flour, and rolling it flat again. I was shelling peas from tightly packed pods into a basin, scrupulously eating just one out of every pod.

  And yet after all we were not in the kitchen but out of doors, with the sun warm on my bare arms and grass under my feet instead of tiles. Tiger, the bull terrier who died when I was four or five, scattered glistening droplets as he shook himself dry from the sea. I could hear Andy somewhere, singing a song about a soldier. But Mother Ryan was still rolling pastry, and I was still shelling peas.

  When Mordecai came across the grass toward us I was not surprised, but I was embarrassed. He had the shotgun beneath his arm and said something about going after pheasant. I knew there were no pheasants on the island, but, more important, going with him would mean abandoning the pea-shelling. I looked at Mother Ryan and she looked back, and I did not know what to do.

  That was when the Demons swooped out of the sky, one menacing her and a second Mordecai. Somehow it was I now who had the gun, but I could not make up my mind which Demon to fire at first. And Antonia was there as well—and Paddy. Other Demons were threatening them.

  I woke with a pounding heart. It took me several moments to be sure there was no Mother Ryan here, no Mordecai . . . and no Demons. No sunlight either, or grass.

  I tried to work out where I might be. There was a deep, throbbing noise which seemed to come from all around. I was lying on a couch in a small chamber, of which one side was strangely curved, and there was a door in the facing wall. Paddy was asleep on a second couch. Diffuse illumination came from long panels in the walls: brighter than lamplight, not so bright as daylight.

  When I sat up, my foot encountered an unfamiliar resilient material, whose very strangeness convinced me this was no dream but reality. Reality where, though? I remembered the great noise in the sky and the fiery chariot. The Demons had come for us. Could we be on the moon?

  I considered waking Paddy but decided to find out more before I did. There were small windows in the curving wall and brighter light beyond. I went to the nearest, uneasily aware of the floor quivering beneath me. The window was no more than two feet across, fitted with thick glass that reflected a distorted image as I drew near.

  At first I was conscious only of sky more intensely blue than any I’d known, and a brilliant sun from which I had to avert my gaze. I looked down as well as out, and felt giddy. White smoke puffed and eddied beneath me. Was this the moon or Hell? Would the smoke part to show the fires of the damned? I drew back, then stopped, and stared in fascination. The smoke formed shapes, and the shapes were of something I knew. I was looking at clouds—not from below but from above.

  As I watched, the clouds divided, opening up a chasm. I stared down a dizzying depth at a miniaturized landscape: pocket-handkerchief fields, the thin silver scrawl of a river, tiny houses, and tinier cattle. The effect was magical, but deeply shocking. I realized I was trembling and had to turn away. I was sitting on the edge of the couch, trying to make sense of it, when the door opened and a man came through.

  “Your friend’s still asleep?” He nodded toward Paddy. “It’s nothing to worry about. The effects vary. She probably inhaled more deeply.”

  I could not place his accent, though it raised an echo. He was about forty, six feet tall, with a somber face—high forehead, broad cheekbones, deepset deep gray eyes, thick black hair combed tightly back. His dress was a light-blue tunic over trousers ending at the knee. These were darker blue, and both garments were of a flimsy material that didn’t seem like either cotton or silk. He had bare legs and wore brown sandals which could have been leather but somehow looked different.

  I didn’t know what to say. He came to sit by me on the couch.

  “It’s bound to be a shock. Ask what questions come to mind, and I’ll do my best to answer. Take your time.” He smiled, and his face was less forbidding. “There’s no hurry.”

  “Where are we? I looked out—”

  “That would be shock enough in itself, I imagine. Since you’re up in the air, this ought to be a Demon’s chariot. In fact, it’s an airplane, which means nothing to you. A Z32 light aircraft, which means even less. Don’t worry. Things will make sense, bit by bit.”

  “The Demons—”

  “That’s easy. There are no Demons.”

  “But I’ve seen them. Several times. I killed some. Or at least I destroyed their nest.”

  He laughed. “So you did, I gather! Or at any rate you smashed the transmitter, which amounts to the same thing. Perhaps I’d better try to give a general explanation and you can put the questions later. My name’s Stephen, by the way.”

  He offered a hand, which I took gingerly. The grip was reassuringly firm.

  “I’m Ben.”

  Stephen nodded. “Yes, we know.”

  • • •

  Paddy stirred and opened her eyes. Stephen let her wake before he told his tale.

  It was a story that overturned everything I had taken for granted since childhood, but it made sense of old doubts and uncertainties and also of many recent events. In the end there came a point at which the picture tilted, and my life as it had seemed till now became the upside-down one.

  The world of our ancestors, he explained, had been full of marvels. After thousands of years of painfully slow advances, a burst of discovery had come which seemed to have no limits. New forms of energy were developed, incredible machines invented. The picture in the book we had found was true—men had indeed traveled to the moon.

  The population increased enormously and came to live in bigger and bigger cities: eventually in supercities comprising many millions. That was where things went wrong.

  “Ants can live together like that,” Stephen said, “but we’re not ants. We belong to a species that functions best in small groups, where we’re individuals relating to one another. We’re a violent species too, and even in those groups we had to develop rules of behavior to control our violence.”

  I remembered, as he spoke, the little community in which I had myself grown up, and my own minor angers and resentments. There had been rules there, laid down and administered by Mother Ryan with loving sternness.

  “Those
rules don’t work where everyone’s a stranger. Men and women had spent tens of thousands of years living in tribes, and suddenly there were no tribes anymore. Parents lost control of themselves, and of their children. It was every man for himself, and woman too. Violence and murder became commonplace, eventually the normal way of life. They preyed on one another beneath the soaring towers of their cities. And when the horror of it became unbearable, they took drugs, which made them forget their misery for a time but in the end destroyed their minds. That was the Madness.”

  “But what destroyed the cities?” Paddy asked.

  “They weren’t destroyed, simply abandoned when they became death traps. People fled from them. And the machines stopped, with no one to tend them, and rusted away. Since everyone had come to depend on machines for food, millions died from starvation.”

  I tried to think of millions. There had been seven of us on Old Isle, maybe two thousand in the whole of the Western Isles. A thousand times that number, dying of hunger surrounded by their great pitiless machines? I thought of the huge ship in the picture in the Master’s house and wondered where it had last docked, to rust away with its crew of skeletons.

  “Those who survived went back to simpler ways. They knew a terrible thing had happened but couldn’t understand why. They felt they were being punished, and that perhaps it was right they should be. They invented a punishing god, the Dark One, to give meaning to their lives. And they brought back strict codes of behavior to make themselves feel safe, and launched little wars to justify the new tribes they were creating.”

  “The new tribes,” I said, “those were the landsmen. What about the sea people?”

  “They were already separate,” Stephen said. “At the height of the breakdown some had taken refuge in remote islands, hoping not only to escape but to preserve mankind’s hard-won knowledge and use it to build a better civilization. As the chaos on the mainlands gave way to warring clans, they began to fear what might happen if the landsmen explored the seas again and threatened their peace.”

  I said, “The landsmen say it was the other way around—that they closed their ports to the sea people for fear they might bring the Madness back.”

  Stephen nodded. “It suited us that they should think so. Just as it suited us for the landsmen to war with one another. Our people used the worship of the Dark One to help keep control. Originally, Demons were just a minor part of the religion of hellfire and damnation. We had machines which could project images, and we sent expeditions to set them up in suitable places on the mainland.”

  Suitable places . . . that meant high up, where they couldn’t be seen. I remembered Mordecai’s comments about the Mill people and the Stack people, and the Mast people in the northern port. And I remembered the Demons’ rules about buildings having to be not more than six times the height of a man. So that their nests, the locations where the projectors were installed, could not be overlooked.

  I said, “But didn’t the landsmen see them doing it?”

  “The aircraft were camouflaged with artificial flames, to look like Demons’ chariots. And those areas were blanketed with a gas that produces temporary unconsciousness—the same one we used on you and those troopers. After the machines were put in, the Demons were programmed to appear at dusk on certain days.”

  Paddy said, “But the Demons come when the Summoners call them.”

  Stephen said, “It wasn’t enough just to set up the machines. There had to be someone to interpret the wishes of the Demons. The Summoners do that.”

  “You mean, Summoners are agents of the sea people?”

  I thought of Pengelly’s Summoner, shrieking about hellfire, and the dusk of Demons. Stephen said, “It was a hard task, and a lonely one. And it meant a life of exile. But there were those who volunteered to do it.”

  “Do the Demons have to be so frightening?” Even accepting that they weren’t real, I shuddered at the memory.

  “People don’t choose a cruel god unless they want to be terrified. The more horrifying the Demons were, the more they flocked to worship them.”

  Paddy said, “Sacrificing men and women—”

  “Was their own idea too. Not all tribes do it. The Stack people are more bloodthirsty than the rest.”

  “How do they actually die,” she asked, “the victims?”

  “From fear. Long ago there were primitive people who would die when a witch doctor pointed a bone at them. Demons are much more effective.”

  “Yes.” Paddy’s voice was low. “I know.”

  “It’s a horrible business,” Stephen said, “and I wouldn’t attempt to justify it. But the way our people saw it at the time, they were simply trying to protect themselves. It was the landsmen who thought up the sacrifices.”

  I said: “But the killing Demons—the ones who frighten people to death—come twice, the second time when there’s no one there but the person in the Chair.”

  There was a silence before Stephen said, “Some projectors were modified to provide a repeat performance. It was what the Stack people wanted.” Neither Paddy nor I spoke, and after a moment he went on, “That was terribly wrong. There were those who argued it was a lesser evil—that the landsmen’s demon-worshipping religion gave them a kind of stability, and if it collapsed there would be chaos again on the mainlands, and much more misery and death. It wasn’t a good argument. Our people made mistakes, and that was an unforgivable one. But mistakes can be corrected. Changes are taking place, big changes. That’s why we were looking for you, Ben.”

  I stared at him stupidly. “For me?”

  “Your father was the one known as the Master.” I nodded, though it wasn’t a question. “Before he went to the Western Isles he lived in Ireland, where he married your mother. And before that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But even as I spoke, I heard again a teasing familiarity in his accent and knew where I had heard it before.

  Stephen said, “He was one of the sea people. The tribes on the mainland are ruled by Generals, as you know. The islands have a governing council, with a leader known as the Custodian. Your father was Custodian.

  “He saw the need for changes, for making an end not just to the Demons of the sacrifices, but all Demons. He wanted contact with the landsmen restored, so they could be educated out of their ignorance. He argued for it in the Council. Some agreed, but others were afraid an end to the Demons might mean an end to their own good lives.

  “They were in the majority. When your father wouldn’t give in, he was offered the choice of death or exile. He accepted exile, in the hope that a future council might reverse that one’s decision. But he didn’t trust them. He took with him a device which would be activated when the surrounding temperature varied by more than a few degrees from normal blood temperature. When that happened, it would send a signal to a hidden transmitter and release a message calling on the sea people to rise against the Council. He wore it next to his skin. It meant they were safe as long as he lived, but if he died his message would be released.”

  “A round medallion,” I said. “Silvery gray metal, on a gold chain.”

  Stephen nodded. “It was a game of bluff. Your father’s enemies wanted time to consolidate their position. He was a popular man, but they hoped with the passing of time he would be forgotten, and the message would have no effect. But he wasn’t forgotten. When he died and the message was broadcast, there was an uprising. That was when they burned his house in the Western Isles, in case it contained anything else that might damage them.

  “Because the medallion was a transmitter, it could be traced. They discovered it had survived the fire and worked out you must have it. They knew you were his son. They thought they could make use of you, and sent a message through the Summoner of the Western Isles to hold you.”

  “If Ben’s father was so popular,” Paddy said, “couldn’t he have appealed to the sea people at the time, instead of letting them banish him?”

  “His enemies had a weapon of
their own, in the shape of hostages. He had a wife before Ben’s mother, and a son. He bargained for their safety. He thought his son might achieve what he hadn’t been able to do.”

  I felt a strange chill. A son he had acknowledged, and loved. “Why did they need me, if they had him?” I asked.

  “He died as a boy. There’s only you left. And we need you now.”

  “We?”

  “The new Council. The revolution triumphed, but there are still some who are opposed to change. You can help us, and I hope you’ll want to. There are also entitlements. You inherit property in the islands, and certain rights. Above all, of course, the right to live as one of the sea people.”

  There was a pause before Paddy said, brightly, “So you’ve come into your inheritance after all, Ben, even if it’s not the one you expected.” She turned to Stephen. “You may need him, but you won’t need me.”

  Before Stephen could speak, I said, “I’m not going anywhere without her. You can keep the property and rights.”

  He nodded. “That’s why we picked her up with you.”

  “But I don’t have to go,” Paddy said. “Do I?”

  I looked at her; she didn’t look at me. Stephen said, “I imagine you’re thinking of your mother and sister. Ben can bring anyone he wants.”

  I asked, “Mordecai?”

  “Who’s that?”

  When I explained, he said, “So that’s where you were when we lost touch. We found the medallion in a field near the villa. I suppose you dropped it.”

  I shook my head. “I threw it away.”

  “It would have been a lot easier if you hadn’t, and if you’d stayed at the villa till we were ready to get you. The next we knew, you were being held by Ramsay, and then that you’d escaped. It was a close-run thing, getting to you before his men did. As for the gypsy . . . you could bring him, but . . .”

  There was no need to finish the sentence. This new life would hold no attraction for Mordecai. A traveler, he had said, following a known path. I looked at Paddy.

  “You’ll come, though?”