When the sky darkened, Teddy reckoned that was the end of it. He sat against the wall and waited for the Hand of Death to grab his goolies.
‘Recognize this?’ Susan asked the man from the Pottery.
He shrugged.
‘“Black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood,”’ she said. ‘Book of Revelation, somewhere.’
Blood rained from boiling darkness. The ground gave way all round. Something like a red iceberg loomed from one of the cracks, ripping apart the fence at the end of the pub garden.
‘I can only remember the famous bits,’ James said. ‘“His name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”’
‘That’s the one,’ the woman said.
Hell was all round.
Teddy didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell, normally. His parents didn’t go to church except at Christmas and Easter. In his stream at school, he had not had to do religious education. He had never owned or opened a Bible. Christmas was turkey and presents, Easter was chocolate eggs. The Pope was a Polish bloke in a white dress, God was the old man with a beard on Spitting Image, and Jesus was a hippie in films they showed on television on bank-holiday afternoons.
But he recognized Hell.
Angels flew overhead in the red darkness, and devils stalked below, tridents and swords bloody, hooves gouging earth, bat wings flapping, horns sharp. Teddy wanted to face the wall and forget it, but couldn’t.
A fat red devil with Douggie Calver’s broad face came out of the Valiant Soldier. Curly goat’s horns swept around his face, and his eyes were cat-slit. He wore a ‘Drink Scrumpy’ T-shirt and strained-to-splitting Bermuda shorts. The devil stank of cider and used matches. Talons sliced towards Teddy, but James stepped under the blow and smashed the devil in the face with his gun, making blood spout from its ram-nose. James punched him in the belly, and he was seen off. As he ran, an arrow-ended snake of a tail dangled between his legs.
Scarlet lightning cracked the daytime dark of the sky. The blood rain redoubled, turning the ground to fiery mud.
* * *
Paul spat out the blood that flooded his mouth. The shower ended, he was covered from head to foot in sticky red. At last, it had rained. From the black above, waves of heat came down. The blood dried to a crust and fell away in patches. He saw Susan’s face mottled with missing jigsaw pieces of clean skin amid the red. She was scraping clotted filth out of her hair. In the dark she had a slight glow, an all-over halo.
Revelation was the only book of the Bible he had ever read all the way through. It was a cornerstone of his thesis that the imagery of nineteenth-century apocalyptic fiction was adapted from the biblical original. Now, knowing the prophecies didn’t seem to help. He couldn’t get anything straight, and the Bible had too many tribes and angels and seals and beasts to cope with. Tribes, he remembered in a mumble, of Judah, Aser, Manasses, Nepthalim, Levi, Issachar, Zabulon, Benjamin. He wondered if Jago were picking up sides for the battle of Armageddon, allotting people to their tribe. He wanted to be left on the bench with the bespectacled fat kid.
‘Susan,’ Lytton said, ‘how… extensive -?’
She answered before he could finish, picking the question from his mind. ‘I don’t know. It must be localized.’
‘The parish, the county?’
She thought hard. ‘I can’t tell.’
Above, the black churned. The sun was a hole, sucking everything in until it was an absence in the sky. The moon, still not set, was a ball of blood, red as a stop lamp.
How far away were people looking up and seeing this? Were there people a few miles off who saw plain blue and summer sun? Or did everyone in the world have the sky according to Jago?
‘He’s just one mind,’ Susan said, ‘one vision. His Talent feeds on all these people, but he can’t change the whole solar system…’
‘Can’t he?’ Lytton said.
Creatures were fighting in the dark, killing and breaking each other. Ignorant armies clashing by night.
‘Think about it. If the sun went dark, we’d freeze, not boil. The sun and the moon aren’t up together. Jago is projecting pictures. He’s not really making this happen.’
Something with scythes for arms set about a crowd of devils, slicing and dicing until only jellied demon fragments, still writhing, remained.
‘Like I’ve always said,’ Susan insisted, ‘it’s not demons and devils, it’s just chemicals in the brain.’
A gale of demon laughter swept past the pub. A person, piranha imps tearing at flesh, stumbled by, crying out. The victim went down in a pool of flashing teeth, and was devoured.
Paul picked a pebble and bit it with his bad tooth. Sunlight and pain poured in. A man, torn almost inside out, lay in the road. There were no monsters, but there might as well have been. All around, people hurt themselves, hurt each other. As pain receded, dark flooded back.
* * *
Inside the tree, the Maskell family were together. Jeremy, closer than ever to his parents and sister, could see through their eyes, feel through their fingers. Even Jethro was a part of it. Their roots were deep in the earth, anchoring the tree to the soil, so the quakes did not affect them. He was safe. Daddy couldn’t hurt him without hurting himself. Daddy didn’t want to hurt him any more.
It was night again, but a good night, warm and comforting. Protected, Jeremy watched with interest. People who hadn’t changed suffered. Over the top of the Pottery, from the topmost branches, Jeremy saw the garage forecourt. People were pulled into the ground as if the asphalt had become a sucking lake of tar. X and Ingraham were up to their waists, going deeper as they tried to get out. One of the petrol pumps was bobbing, pulled from below. With a gulp, it disappeared completely and sticky black slowly filled in the hole. The tar smoked, belching through cracks in its surface.
Lisa Steyning floated as deep as her armpits, a tyre around her, black goop in her pretty-pretty hair. Not panicking like X and Ingraham, she wasn’t going under. Jeremy wasn’t sorry to see Lisa trapped, but was glad she wasn’t sinking. She was mean to him most of the time, but there was something about her—her hair, perhaps—he liked, or thought he would like in a few years, when he got interested in girls. Would have liked, he corrected himself. He would have to be his own teacher, and watch how he thought. Things were different. His life wasn’t going to be what he’d expected, what his mother and teachers had told him it would be. Only Daddy had really known, and he had not told anyone because they’d never believe until it started happening.
It was funny, having a tree as a body, sharing a body with the others. Hannah’s thoughts whispered in his mind, reciting her times tables. That was Mummy’s remedy for nightmares. Whenever Jeremy or Hannah had bad dreams, Mummy suggested they go over their times tables—as far as they had learned them — in their heads, and the evil dwarves or scary monsters would go away. Times tables, she explained, were logic. Numbers could overcome the things in the dark. Mummy had been wrong. Jeremy felt Mummy’s love, neat and safe like a blanket. And he felt Daddy’s strength.
On the lawn, Fancy stood, chewing apples that fell from the tree. The horse had been sick, but was better now.
X and Ingraham had been gulped under. Ingraham was gone altogether, but X floated face down, the back of his X-shaven head above the surface, arms outstretched in front of him, the back of his T-shirt a bubble over the black, the rest of him deep under. Little flames danced around him.
Jeremy felt the buds of the tree swell. There’d be more fruit soon.
* * *
‘She’s right,’ Paul said. ‘It’s like there are two pictures.’
Susan felt his pain, sharp and pure. And saw what he saw. It was no better than what everyone else in Alder was stuck with, even if the sun was shining and the moon had set. Reality hurts, she thought.
A demon cavalry officer rode by the pub, in a tight red tunic with gold piping and epaulettes, a human skin worn en pelisse over one shoulder, tall shako fixed to his head by horns, red-hot sabre in one elegantly gloved claw. He was mounted on a large locust, regimental symbols etched into its carapace, saddle perched on its wing-case. The insect trotted like a well-drilled steed. The moustached demon surveyed the carnage with all the superior insouciance of a marshal of France. People fell before the locust, chomped by its triangular mouth, borne down by its shod forelegs. The officer slashed deftly, detaching heads and arms.
She heard shrieks of panic in her mind. This Armageddon was the fusion of everyone’s dreams and fancies, sucked into Jago’s overwhelming self-belief. His was the basic shape of the drama, but everyone else provided set dressing, worked in their own business. It was a community play, a sprawling spectacle costumed in fancy dress gathered from the back of closets, sets knocked together by DIY freaks with more enthusiasm than skill, variably acted.
The mounted locust was impressive and detailed. But other vignettes were barely sketched in. A cardboard-box robot lumbered down the street, a stiff wire spiral of smoke coming from the flashing light on its head, legs crumpling as it stamped.
Much of the village was destroyed and replaced. A chest-high mountain range had erupted along one side of the main road, throwing back houses and gardens. A black tower, like a large chess castle, stood askew where the Cardigan house had been, ravens circling its battlements, fire pouring from its gutters. Catsized red ants surrounded the tower with miniature siege engines.
Susan tried to create an island of calm. She found her centre, and let it radiate. The ground stopped shaking in the pub garden, and light penetrated the dark.
‘Susan, is that you?’ Lytton asked.
His words shocked her, and she lost it.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
She shook his apology away, and tried again. It took all her concentration, and showed just how feeble her Talent was next to Jago’s. There was now a smooth stretch of pub lawn beneath, garden furniture jumbled up together against the wall. Light descended around them. Teddy shoved himself away from the wall and, unsteadily, stood up. They all looked up at the gap in the night.
Her head was heavy, pain throbbing inside. Her temples hurt, and the entire back of her skull. Still, she’d affected it somehow.
A girl scrambled over the wall, bursting through the curtain of dark, and lay, gasping. She was a redhead, dressed in black, white legs showing through holes in her tights, scrapes on her bare back. She crawled to Lytton, seeking security, and hugged his legs.
‘You’ve found an admirer,’ Susan said.
He looked embarrassed. ‘This is Pam. She’s a nuisance.’
Pam did not speak, just whimpered a little. Another mental casualty.
* * *
His wife and children were in their places. And he was fixed to the soil. No matter what strife might rage around, the Maskell Family Tree was safe.
The blood of the boy who’d been sacrificed fed and watered them. Sue-Clare was nestled by his side, head in his armpit, arms wrapped tight around him. The children grew where they should, sprouting branches of their own.
The couple who’d slept in his shade were awake now, presenting offerings. The man found some bananas inside the house and laid them on a shelf that ran around the trunk. They slumped before Maskell, looking up with reverence. Others had joined them in worship. Maskell had a congregation. Everyone was looking for something to believe in these days. He had found nature’s path, and it was his duty to let the word spread.
‘Show us, oh Swamp Thing,’ the man said, ‘show us the way.’
Maskell was amused, but didn’t reply.
‘The sun is black, the moon is red,’ the man said. ‘Save us.’
‘Yes,’ chimed the others, ‘save us.’
Maskell stretched branches. He wondered what his first demand should be. Most of the worshippers were young men and women who’d come for the festival. But there were a few villagers mixed in. Reg Gilpin stood, naked to the waist, looking up at his former employer.
Maskell remembered Reggie from when he was a boy. An electric wire snapped by the house and fell out of the sky, sparking and kicking like an angry eel. The wire brushed the tree, and he recalled the first spark of the soil.
‘Come forward,’ he roared. ‘Bring me Reggie Gilpin.’
Reggie was astounded. He had not recognized Maskell. None of the others knew Reggie, but his reaction gave him away. The worshippers grabbed him and forced him to his knees before the tree, shoving his face into the dirt between the roots.
Maskell’s quirt hung from the tree trunk, supple and strong.
He extended arms from his trunk and grabbed Reggie, hugging him to the tree. His quirt whipped out, twining around Reggie’s waist like an elephant’s trunk, and grew tight. The worshippers gave a hearty cheer as Reggie came apart. Goodness spread on the tree and the ground.
* * *
Since he last saw her, Pam had become demented. Luckily, she’d turned timid rather than unmanageable. In the oasis of peace Susan had made of the garden, Lytton hugged the girl like a baby. There was no desire in her clinging, just a desperate need for comfort.
Without consulting anyone, he made a unilateral decision.
‘Okay,’ he told Susan, ‘I’m pulling the plug.’
She nodded, knowing what he meant.
He had twelve cartridges in the Browning, another full clip in his pocket.
‘If Jago goes, this all stops, right?’
Susan shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
He had been hoping for more positive approval.
‘It’d be a start.’
‘Certainly.’
He looked at Pam, a frightened child under the streaks of make-up. And he saw Teddy, a broken doll bent by the weight of wonders. There were dead people up and down the street. And monsters.
But could he kill someone? Even to stop all this?
‘I don’t think he’s really alive anyway,’ Susan said. ‘His Talent has eaten away whatever mind he started out with.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’
‘I can’t help it. You scream your thoughts, you know.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
He imagined putting the Browning to Jago’s head, and pulling the trigger until the clip was empty.
‘Ugh,’ she said. ‘Messy.’
He gave Pam to Paul and said, ‘Look after her. And Teddy.’
The young man nodded. Pam’s tenacious grip was transferred to him.
He hoped he could just walk up to the Agapemone, let himself in and get to Jago without anyone trying to stop him.
‘You wish,’ Susan said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
He did not even have to think his objection.
‘You can’t do it alone. A Talent could see you coming a mile off. Even a stone-crazy Messiah like Jago. I can engage his attention long enough for you to get near. Then it’s up to you. Bang bang bang.’
She made a finger gun and pointed it.
‘I’ll try,’ Susan said, answering some mental question of Paul’s. ‘Where she is, she should be safe. Once Jago is gone, she should be okay. Everyone should be free then.’
‘Let’s go,’ he said, stepping over the garden wall, back into pandemonium.