The Cockatrice Boys

  “No, it’s mighty queer,” said Dakin. “He’s not wounded—or even much bruised—but he’s very weak, delirious, I think. He says his hands and feet hurt terribly, and his face—could it be frostbite? He keeps on all the time, mumbling about hands and feet and faces. I can’t make head or tail of what he says, or what’s really the matter with him.”

  “He say anything about where he was? When he was off the train?”

  “Nothing that makes sense.”

  “Or about Sauna? After all, he went missing the same time she did.”

  Dakin shook his head.

  “Well, you better take him this drink while it’s hot,” said Mrs. Churt crossly. “I can tell you, I need five pair of hands round this galley. I wish Sauna was here, and that’s a fact.”

  Chafed and annoyed, though he could not exactly have said with whom, Dakin returned to the noisy dark cabin squashed in behind the engine. Here Tom Flint was tossing and turning on his narrow bunk.

  “Don’t leave me!” he cried out wildly. “Why did you leave me?”

  “Well, it wasn’t for very long!” snapped Dakin. “Here, drink this blessed stuff and stop kicking up such a row.”

  But Tom Flint spilled most of the wintergreen.

  “Oh!” he cried. “See the people with their faces all on fire! Oh, look at them! Look at them! And their hands and feet burning like torches! How terrible upon the mountains are the feet of those—of those—”

  He kicked off the covers and stared wildly at his own feet. “I think they are growing webs. I will thrust my hands and feet into the flame,” he told Dakin.

  “I wish you’d stow your gab,” said Dakin.

  Dr. Wren came along to visit the patient. Before becoming an archbishop he had trained in medicine, and so had been very busy caring for all the men injured in the Basilisk attack.

  He felt Flint’s forehead and hands, then stared into his eyes.

  “It’s odd. He doesn’t have a fever, although he’s so hot and restless; but just look at his eyes.”

  “What’s up with ’em?” asked Dakin.

  “The pupils are pinpoints—as if he’d been staring at a bright light.”

  “Not in here he hasn’t,” said Dakin.

  “Well, give him one of these mushroom tablets—if you can get him calm enough to swallow it. And you must stay with him. I don’t want him left, not for more than a moment or so. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Why should I get saddled with this boring job? thought Dakin resentfully, as Dr. Wren bustled off to care for his wounded men.

  “Here, swallow this pill, will you, and stop moaning,” Dakin snapped, as Flint heaved himself about, and by luck more than dexterity managed to get it down the patient’s throat. After a while, Flint calmed down a trifle.

  He glanced warily round the tiny room.

  “They went off and left me,” he told Dakin. “They betrayed me. After all their promises.”

  “Who did?”

  “Never you mind!” whispered Flint. His eyes slid sideways and met those of Dakin. He smiled. “Do you want to know where the girl is?” he said. “Do you want to know why they took her?”

  He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket. “They forgot I have this.” Now his smile was sly and triumphant. “They left me—so why should I care for them?”

  Dakin was not at all interested in the piece of paper. He said angrily, “Was it you who helped snatch Sauna? Was it? Do you know where she is? Tell me!”

  Tom Flint was staring at the paper. “If only I could read it…” he muttered irritably. “Here—you try!” He pushed the sheet at Dakin, who gave it a cursory glance.

  “No, I can’t read it,” he said shortly. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s in some crazy writing—nothing but noughts and crosses. Tell me about Sauna. Where did they take her?”

  “Up towards Crook of Devon—up towards Rumbling Bridge,” whispered Flint. “That’s where the witches are. Oh yes! There’s always been covens in places like that—dark places, deep places, where the water comes crashing and sliding down, where the woods pull in till it’s dark at midday. The girl’s grandfather, he was a warlock, and her great-grandfather too—all the way back, all the way back to Grandfather Cain! I know! I’ve been there too!”

  “Is that where Sauna was taken? Crook of Devon?” persisted Dakin. “Who by? Where is it?”

  “You see,” said Tom Flint, “they need hands. Human hands. To do their jobs.” He spread out his own hands, then bundled them under his armpits with a childish wail. “They are burning! Burning like phosphorus! All—all the waters of paradise will not quench that fire!”

  “Tell me why they took Sauna?” Dakin repeated.

  “They need the girl to find the book. Human hands,” cried Flint. “They need hands. They can’t—you see—dig it out.” He grinned maliciously. “And the girl—with her gift—is as good as a truffle-hound.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Sorrow,” said Flint. “They shall eat the bread of sorrow and burn in perpetual fire.”

  “I wish you would talk sense. Did you or did you not go with those men who took Sauna?”

  “How can I tell?” said Flint. “After all, they may still come back for me. I daren’t risk it.”

  “Risk what? Oh!” cried Dakin furiously. “You are hopeless!”

  “Yes, hopeless. Hopeless, hopeless. With hands and feet and face of fire.”

  The loud wail of the monster-alarm echoed up and down the train. Dakin jumped up impatiently and left the cabin, slamming the door behind him. “Off you go!” Flint shouted after him. “Don’t let the sergeant forget to unwrap his lucky parcel.”

  Surely nothing can happen to the fellow in there, thought Dakin, running to his own quarters and grabbing his goggles and electric crossbow. He had no idea what Flint’s last remark could have meant—just rubbish, most probably.

  But when the alert was over—it proved to have been a mistaken warning, a group of red deer crossing the track—and Dakin returned to the cabin, Tom Flint seemed to have undergone a surprising change. His cheeks were plumper, he was a better colour, he talked more sensibly. If he were a balloon, thought Dakin, I’d say somebody had blown him up.

  “You see, the ozone layer was punctured,” he suddenly remarked confidentially to Dakin. “That’s how all the monsters got in. It happens easily during the Sleep of Reason.”

  “Oh?” said Dakin, neither understanding nor believing him. “Who punctured it, then?”

  “Fumes … heat … all these products of a more comfortable life. But of course my friends were lightning-quick to take advantage of the situation.” Flint spoke proudly, like the managing director of a company giving a successful annual report. “They slipped the monsters through.”

  “But why? from where?”

  “Oh … somewhere else…”

  “Why?” Dakin asked again.

  “To produce maximum chaos, in order to take over the globe. This is the weakest point, so this is where they began. Naturally. Disintegration of the human ethos. It’s like…” Tom Flint’s eyes wandered round the stuffy little cabin. For a moment, disconcertingly, the irises disappeared clean out of sight, leaving only the whites. “It is like growing a bacterial culture,” he said then, his eyes returning to normal. “You need some really dirty, scummy water. Nourishment for the new organism you want to grow.”

  “What organism?” Dakin yawned. He was bored. The little cabin had no windows; he wished he could walk along the corridor and see where the train had got to.

  “My friends. The adversaries.”

  “Adversaries of what?”

  “Honour. Order. Respect for law. What my friends really want to get hold of is Scott’s book. The Book of Power. For their task must be done by human hands,” he repeated. “And this is where you can help them—”

  Dakin yawned again. He did not want to help anybody. He was fed up with standing on the sidelines, being helpful. What he wanted was glory,
to be in a battle again, rattling on his drum, feeling important and powerful, part of it all.

  He remembered the terrific excitement of the battle at Manchester. Lost in recall, he paid little heed to the voice of Tom Flint, who was waffling on about this old book that had been lodged in a hermit’s cell hundreds of years ago. “Sorrow—not in the sense of grief, you understand, but from the old word sorren, meaning a service of hospitality to a clan chieftain…”

  Oh, blow you and your sorrows, thought Dakin, wishing there might be another Kelpie warning. Kelpies were slow beasts; they didn’t provide the mad excitement of Basilisks, or the terror of Trolls or Griffins, but anything would be better than being obliged to sit here and listen to this interminable dreary rubbish about abbeys and caves and glens.

  “What was your favourite food when you were small?” Tom Flint unexpectedly asked.

  “Oh!” Dakin was startled. “I suppose, Pollylollies. Oh, I could have eaten hundreds of them when I was a kid—”

  Gorgeously coloured, they were. Came in little string sacks.

  “Suppose you had a hundred tons of them now?”

  “Yuk!”

  “Well, what would you like best in the world now? A helibike?”

  “What would be the good? Too many monsters about.”

  He had longed for one, though. Only the sons of millionares could afford them, or gangsters.

  “What then?” the insidious voice kept pressing. “What would you really, really like best?”

  “Just playing on my drum,” Dakin croaked. “In a battle. That’s what I like best.”

  “Ah…”

  The alarm sounded again. Dakin dashed gladly to the door.

  “We shall see what we can do,” Tom Flint called after him. “Don’t forget the book. Don’t forget it! It will be wrapped in cloth-of-copper. Pinned with a gold pin. It would be best if you found it before your cousin Sauna does … otherwise the glory will be hers, of course, not yours…”

  Oh be quiet, you, Dakin thought, I’m not listening. And he ran on, even when a curious shriek sounded from the cabin behind him—a shriek of pain, was it, or joy?

  The train had come to a halt because the lights of Alloa were visible across the estuary; but there were Kelpies ahead, ensconced in large numbers on the viaduct.

  After the long, arduous and tiresome battle which followed—no drumwork was required, only dogged bashing and close combat with electric rays—Dakin was hurt, and suffered from a sharp sense of injustice when the colonel, spotting him, sharply ordered him to get back to Flint’s cabin, on the double.

  “You should not have left it. Why did you do so? You were not supposed to quit your watch. The archbishop was most emphatic that he should not be left alone.”

  “But I wanted to help fight the Kelpies, sir.” Dakin was injured and virtuous. “It was battle stations.”

  “There were enough men for that without you. Return to your post at once.”

  And, disastrously, when Dakin got back to the cabin, Tom Flint was not there.

  “Perhaps he jumped off the observation platform?” suggested Major Scanty.

  “Impossible!” declared the colonel. “I was there all the time. It is extremely vexatious. What do you think can have happened to him, Archbishop?”

  “I am afraid his friends may have come back for him.”

  “And who’s been rummaging in my bunk?” demanded Sergeant Bellswinger furiously.

  “Somebody after your secret parcel, Ser’nt?” teased Ensign Pomfret.

  Everybody knew that, ever since the train had left Manchester, the sergeant had a mysterious flat packet, done up in snark-proof, waterproof paper, which he tucked into his battle-blouse before every engagement. No one had asked what it was. Many had guessed.

  “Ah, no, that’s safe enough.” The sergeant tapped his diaphragm. “But I’d like to know what so-and-so’s been fossicking in my berth. I bet it was that mealy-mouthed supercargo. Everyone else was out fighting except for Mrs. Churt, and I’m sure it wasn’t her.”

  Dakin was in slight disgrace.

  Chapter nine

  Daylight of a sort had returned to the cottage when Sauna next woke.

  The storm still raged outside. She could see a grey whirl of snow pass the window. When she opened the door snowflakes slashed at her like razor-blades.

  She flinched back inside again and shut the door. The fire glowed faintly; with blue fingers she piled on more lumps of peat then, for the first time, forced herself to look around the small, frowsty room.

  The floor of beaten earth was piled several inches deep with layers of newspaper, yellow and crinkled with age and dirt. The last date was ten years back. When Mam and Dad were still alive, thought Sauna sadly.

  Then she compelled herself to look at the narrow cot-bed which stood by the wall opposite the entrance door. Something lay on it covered and wrapped in thin moth-eaten grey blankets, stiff with dirt. Something faintly moved. Sauna could see—just—the weak, flickering rise and fall of breath. Holding her own breath, battling against violent repugnance, she tiptoed over and stared at what lay there.

  It seemed more like a skeleton than a human being. Sparse yellow hair spread thinly over the bony scalp. The face was skin stretched tight over bone: greyish skin, speckled and blotched and wrinkled and scabbed—more like something you’d find out of doors than a person, thought Sauna; fungus, a rotten log, a withered cabbage leaf. The eye-sockets were sunken in shrunken knot-holes like tree bark. The hands, lying loose on the pillow, were gnarled like roots.

  Don’t wake. Please don’t wake, thought Sauna. She crept away from the bed, still holding her breath, although the howl of the wind outside drowned any noise made inside the house, save the buzz of several large bluebottle flies, which slammed angrily from side to side, up under the ceiling.

  What I need, thought Sauna rather hopelessly, is a pot, something to heat water in.

  She tiptoed into the back room. It was divided from the front by a short passage, only half a dozen steps long. In the middle of this a ladder fastened to the wall led up to a square opening, presumably giving on to a loft.

  Sauna might have thought she was now immune to shocks, but the back room startled her so much that she had to lean against the door frame to get her breath. For—apart from a dresser along the opposite wall—the room was a faithful replica of her Aunt Florence’s front parlour in the flat in Manchester. Here was the table with its discoloured lace cloth, here the red velour-covered chairs, the television set, the tiled fireplace with a paper fan in a jam jar, the potted palm and, covering every horizontal surface, the myriads of little china mugs and vases, each with its message: “A Present from Southsea,” “A Present from Westcliffe,” “A Present from Hove,” “A Present from Margate,” “A Present from St. Leonards-on-Sea.”

  The sight of the back room was so staggering that Sauna had to lean against the wall till her legs recovered their strength. She stared at what she saw for a long minute, almost stupefied with disbelief. They can’t be here. They just can’t. How can they?

  Then—is that Aunt Florence, after all?

  If not, who else can it be?

  Noting an old enamel milkpan and a battered spoon and fork on the dresser, she mechanically picked up these articles and returned to the front room.

  There she had her second shock in five minutes, quite as bad as the first one. For the figure on the bed was now sitting bolt upright, grinning at her with eyes turned to slits.

  “Getting settled in? That’s right,” remarked the high, lilting voice. “Make a little porridge, why don’t you? Aye, parritch, parritch—a gude Scots dish!” And the creature giggled, showing two rows of yellow artificial teeth.

  “Are you Aunt Florence?”

  “Who else should I be, dearie? Or else I’ll do till the next one comes along.” Another giggle. “But I told you. I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. All the powers of the air are my friends. Astarte, Abiron, Asmodeus, Belial, Buktanoos, Baal
, Chemosh, Dusien, Eblis, Musboot, Zulbazan … all, all my friends. And this one, too.”

  She gave a twitch to her blankets, and—to Sauna’s horror—a grey head poked out from under them: that of a large, flea-bitten, seedy-looking rat, which peered watchfully at Sauna, showed its teeth, then let out a shrill, thin, hostile sound between a hiss and a squeak.

  “Oh no!” Sauna clutched her pan by the handle, raised it up instinctively—she detested rats—but the voice from the bed halted her.

  “Don’t you go for to bash him, dearie. He’s my friend. He won’t hurt you, if you don’t hurt him. That is—not unless I tell him.”

  Aunt Florence grinned again, slit-eyed.

  “We find our friends where we can, eh? Don’t we, my bubsy, my mutchkin? My precious, my piggesnie? Where we can. Later on, you can see my other friends. Yes; later on they’ll be back. Now you make that porridge, why don’t you? We must keep strong, yes, keep strong. And ratto here would be glad of a nuncheon.”

  * * *

  At Alloa the Cockatrice crew had a lot of bridge-building to do before the viaduct across the Links of Forth was safe; it took them two days’ work, and the nights were passed in battling off hordes of Kelpies who would have undone all the work again.

  Alloa was a fishing and ferry town where large boats had once tied up. It lay between three rivers, the Devon, the Black Devon, and the wide Forth itself, meandering in shining links across the marshy plain to meet its estuary. Few people lived here any more, because of the Kelpies, which came in extra numbers because of the double tides. The town was wreathed in juicy green weed and smelt of salt damp. To the north, less than a mile away across the flat floor of the valley, on the other side of the Devon river, rose the menacing slopes of the Ochils, like a steep volcanic wall—which they once had been—clothed in oak and fir, capped with snow.

  There was a rumour running about the train that a big battle was imminent. No one knew where it had started. Everybody was keyed-up and excited.