Jago (25 page)

He still hadn’t got it sorted out in his mind, but he knew the Martian war machine had been for him. Who else would have recognized it? He sat on the verandah steps, leaning against the sun-warmed stone wall, and held his head. He wanted to take something to dull the hurt in his tooth, but he couldn’t afford to fog his mind. He needed to think this through. Anyway, although Hazel said the doctor had left pills for him, she had not told him where they were. He sloshed spittle around the tooth, imagining the pain washing away. Momentarily it helped, but pain came back in an instant.

Everything was changed.

Fish do not grow on bushes. And, worse, Martian war machines are not only impossible, they are fictional.

Almost anything else would have put less strain on his credulity, his sanity. If he’d close-encountered an alien spacecraft of unfamiliar design, all he’d have to do was accept a vast body of UFO lore, proceeding from the logical, well-founded position that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe to the farfetched, but not entirely lunatic, notion that such intelligent life was given to dropping by Planet Earth once in a while. If it had been a Tyrannosaurus Rex chomping on poached sheep, he could blame genetic engineers fooling with fossil tissue, guess that radioactive waste from Hinkley Point nuclear power station had seeped into the seabed and revived the creature, or assume a timewarp was operating in the locality. If it had been Lord Lucan, Elvis Presley or Martin Bormann playing with matches, the meeting would be merely unlikely and he could make a fortune tattling to a tabloid. If it had been a transparent Duke of Monmouth clanking chains and crying for his rightful throne, Paul would just have to admit there were such things as ghosts. These weren’t positions he was especially keen to adopt, but all were within the bounds of credibility. After all, the bulk of humanity subscribed to religions founded on only barely less unlikely premises.

But a Martian war machine? This wasn’t a scientific unknown, or a psychic phenomenon, or a strange-but-true story, or a miracle from God. This was something
made up
in 1898, something that had no existence outside the imagination of H. G. Wells. Somewhere in the world, you could find people who believed in ghosts and demons, elves and fairies, the curse of King Tut, Jesus Christ Our Lord and Redeemer, Whitley Streiber’s extraterrestrial anal molesters, American professional wrestling matches, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the yeti, George Bush’s campaign promises, the characters on
EastEnders,
the Hollow Earth Theory, Bacon’s authorship of
Hamlet,
Ambrose-Collectors from Atlantis,
The Amityville Horror,
Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ goal, ‘double biological’ soap powders. The human race, among its other accomplishments, could persuade itself, individually or in mass, to believe almost bloody anything. But nowhere had anyone ever—except briefly over Halloween 1938, when Orson Welles was trick-or-treating—believed in Martian war machines.

Yet the thing hadn’t been ambiguous. It had been what it was, as real as his pain. His bruises were proof. He could still feel the jarring impact of the machine’s metal leg. It had rattled his teeth, making his tooth flare. His skin was broken where the thing had scraped.

Paul experimented with the notion of hallucination. After all, he’d spent the greater portion of the last few months, the last five years, thinking about his thesis, and Wells’s Martians were central to his argument. People see what they expect to see: whether it be the Virgin Mary, dome-headed midgets in glowing saucers, or the buckskin-fringed King of Rock ’n’ Roll. He could have misinterpreted, seeing something that put him in mind of a Martian war machine and mentally transforming it into one.

He held his tooth between thumb and forefinger, trying to squeeze out the pain.

Seizing on the hallucination theory, he chewed it in his mind: the Martian war machine had been instantly recognizable because it was
his
Martian war machine. The
War of the Worlds
movie substituted Cornish-pasty-shaped flying ships, and the various illustrations he’d seen on book or album covers weren’t quite right. They were frailer, or more rounded, or less mechanical. The thing he’d seen up on the hill was his mental picture, compounded of the author’s description and his own detail-filling imagination. The thing appeared to him exactly as he imagined it. For a moment, he thought he had an answer, then he knew he had only more questions.

One of the problems with the novel—although, for Paul, it was a strength—was that Wells never quite explained how a three-legged machine could move. Logically, it would have to be like a one-legged man on two crutches, but that doesn’t sound threatening enough. Christopher Priest, in
The Space Machine,
worked out a system involving a spinning-top motion, but that struck Paul as too awkward. The film-makers had just copped out and got rid of the legs. The war machine last night moved naturally, as if having three legs was entirely the usual arrangement and unsteady bipeds were at a disadvantage.

It had been unimaginable. Therefore, he could not have imagined it. It had been real. It had hurt him, it had displaced indisputably real objects, and it had used a real heat ray. Imaginary hallucinations do not start actual fires.

And the kid, the mohican-haired kid, he’d seen it too.

Paul looked up at the fire site on the hill. It was peaceful now, blackened earth and burned-out trees blending in with yellowleaved bushes and tanned grass.

Paul tried to picture the kid. It was hard to remember anything but his hair, the one detail overwhelming his ordinary face and standard ripped-jeans-and-a-T-shirt outfit. He’d been skinny, and he’d had a London accent. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he had said. He’d pushed Paul, thumping his shoulder. He’d been wearing a black leather wristlet, dotted with studs. The kid had seen the war machine. Two people couldn’t share a hallucination. Paul knew he had to find that kid, talk to him. Maybe, if he did, he wouldn’t go mad.

D
addy was strange this morning.

During the school holidays, they always had breakfast together, Daddy tucking into bacon and eggs because he’d already done a couple of hours’ work, Mummy having just yoghurt and fruit juice because she was forever on a diet, Hannah and Jeremy eating cereal and drinking orange.

Today, they all arrived at the table at different times. Mummy was getting breakfast ready in the kitchen, making a lot of noise, when Jeremy, in his pyjamas, came down to the dining room and found Daddy sitting in his usual chair, covered with earth.

It was over his shirt, hands and face. His cheeks were plastered, like an African tribesman’s, with lines of chalk mixed in. Often, he would get dirty. Farming, he said, was a mucky job most of the time. But one of the rules of the house was that you washed before coming to the table.

Jeremy was outraged. Daddy was supposed to make the rules, not break them.

‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘you’re dirty.’

Mummy had the radio on in the kitchen, and pop music gurgled out. Daddy turned to Jeremy. Egg-white eyes opened in his mask of dry earth.

‘Daddy?’

‘Here it comes,’ said Mummy, stepping in with a tray.

The tray hit the floor and flipped over, scattering bacon rashers and globs of scrambled egg. A plate smashed, and knives and forks skittered on the tiling.

‘Maurice,’ Mummy gasped, ‘what the
fuh—’

Daddy looked at Mummy, and she made a scared face.

Hannah tumbled late into the room, rubbing sand out of her eyes, yawning. She sat at the table and filled her bowl with cornflakes.

‘Daddy, you look silly,’ she said, and sloshed in the milk.

Mummy sat down and shook her head. Daddy’s clothes were torn. There were streaks of blood in his dirt mask. His jeans were ruined, the fly exploded and filth-clogged.

Daddy didn’t say anything. Jeremy backed away.

‘Sit down,’ Mummy said.

Jeremy didn’t want to go near Daddy, but didn’t want to go against Mummy either. He pulled his chair back and slid into it, never letting his eyes move from Daddy’s brown face. Hannah was eating as usual. Daddy put his hands on the table, and crumbs of soil spread from his fingers. Daddy smiled an Evil Dwarf smile, a line of spit damping the earth around his lips, and his mouth began to open. He coughed, and chunks of dirt came out, burping on to the table.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ Mummy asked, gingerly putting her clean hand on Daddy’s dirty sleeve.

‘Nothing,’ Daddy croaked. His voice had changed, as if his throat had turned to bark and planes of rough wood were rasping together inside him. ‘I’ve put things right with the land,’ Daddy said.

Jeremy looked at Mummy. Obviously, no one knew what to do. Hannah finished her cereal and pushed her chair back.

‘Sit down,’ Daddy told her.

Unsure, she did, stuttering out a ‘But… but’ before going silent and sulking.

‘Give thanks, family.’

Jeremy looked down at the tabletop, then sideways at Mummy. Mummy was scared. That made Jeremy scared too. Scared of Daddy.

He saw dirt thick around Daddy’s fingers, coating the nails, clodding in between like duck-webbing. There were rootlike tendrils mixed in with the earth, growing out of Daddy.

He looked up. Daddy had taken an apple from the bowl and was eating it. The apple should have been thrown out today, since it was half shrivelled and nobody had bothered with it before. Jeremy was sure there were maggots in it. As Daddy ate, more dry earth fell from his face. It came off in chunks, showing his skin. Daddy was changed. There were boils on his forehead. Red and protuberant, like little bruised apples, they seemed about to break. His face was longer, nose extended, the beginnings of a wispy beard around his chin. He munched the apple down, skin, pips, core and all.

‘We must make sacrifices,’ he said, reaching for a breadknife.

Mummy flinched, and Hannah was crying. Daddy pulled his sleeve and bared his forearm. The music from the kitchen burbled out, a disc jockey interrupting to read out funny items about the weather from the papers. Daddy stuck the breadknife into his arm. Blood came, but not much. A greeny-yellow liquid seeped out. The blood was just a few red threads in the other, sappy stuff. It smelled like glue. Daddy pulled the breadknife out of himself and put it down. The hole he had made opened and closed like a goldfish’s mouth, spewing more of the yellow-green on to the table.

Mummy got up, and Daddy hit her. His arm was longer than usual, and he fetched Mummy a hard thump on the side of her head, lifting her out of her chair, pitching her across the floor. Mummy fell down, chair tangled in her legs, and, although she tried, didn’t get up again. There was blood in her hair.

‘Now,’ Daddy said, ‘bow, you heathens.’

Jeremy and Hannah bowed their heads and mumbled. Daddy laughed, not like himself but like the Evil Dwarf. Dopey had come in the night and eaten his brain. Jeremy
knew
this had happened. The Daddy-shaped thing at breakfast was just the leftovers from the meal.

The children looked again. Mummy was pulling herself up, shaking her head dizzily, holding tight to the table edge for balance. She got her seat upright beneath her, and slumped. Daddy had mashed part of her hair, and a bleeding bruise was showing. She opened her mouth to complain, but a glance from Daddy’s rotten eyes silenced her. He reached out again, and Mummy flinched, but instead of hitting, he stroked. His fingers smoothed her hair against the gash in her head, and she winced.

Daddy smiled. Mummy was whimpering quietly, like Hannah when she was scolded. Mummy touched Daddy’s arm, fingertips probing the wound, dabbling in the honeyish gum. Daddy nodded, and Mummy tasted her finger. Weakly, she tried a smile.

‘See,’ Daddy said.

Jeremy looked at the shell that had been his Daddy. The boils on his forehead burst, drops of clear liquid dribbling past his eyes. Tiny shoots, bright green like spring bulbs, were emerging from his head, curling slightly in the light. In his smile, his teeth were bright yellow, like corns on a cob.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘what shall we do today?’

‘H
azel?’ The girl was distracted, blank-faced. Her eyes were large, waiflike. ‘It’s me, Susan. Remember, from last night.’ She’d found Hazel on the private road to the Agapemone, walking and dreaming. Weirdly, Susan saw herself in Hazel’s mind, face cracked into three.

‘Oh, uh, hi,’ said the girl. ‘Good morning.’

She wasn’t wearing shoes, just grubby wool socks. Bumping into Susan unnerved her, as if she’d met someone she knew only from a dream.

‘Good morning. Are you all right?’

Hazel pushed a hand through her hair, scratching her scalp. Susan saw her confusion. She might be in traumatic shock. Then again, she might just be a daydreamer. It was too easy to intuit the worst all the time.

‘How’s your boyfriend?’

‘All right,’ she said, without conviction. ‘Up and about.’

They were by the side of the road. Usually, there was no traffic. Today there was almost a jam, with carloads of festival-goers turning up early. There were several travellers’ caravans, possessions roped to roofs, rickety and battered as an Okie convoy.

‘Out for a walk?’

Hazel tried to think. Susan tried to read her. She’d been almost sleepwalking.

‘I thought… uh… I’d visit the Agapemone again… thank you…’

She saw in Hazel a vacancy, a need. The girl was under pressure, not easy to read accurately. She was just Jago’s type, a vessel steadily emptied, waiting to be filled with the faith.

Susan didn’t know what to do. Less ignorant of the dangers of the Agapemone than anyone, she ought to try to put Hazel off. But warning Hazel would rip her Sister of the Agapemone snakeskin. Soothsaying wasn’t her style, anyway. That was why she was Susan Anonymous. She didn’t want to end up like Cassandra, kicked to death.

A biker cruised by, engine protesting, squeezing between the cars and the verge. Susan and Hazel had to step out of his way. The boy’s jacket-back, with a flaming skull and ‘Route 666’ logo, reminded her that Wendy’s leather ghost was still around. At the fire, Susan thought she’d glimpsed him mingling with the bystanders.