Pax Britannia: Human Nature (37 page)

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion.

And then the blasphemy was swaying there before him, a huge shark-like tail lashing the air angrily behind it.

The creature peered down at Creed from its lofty position and the tormented priest responded in the only way he knew how.

"Begone, Satan!" the Reverend Creed roared, with all the conviction of his best fire and brimstone preaching voice.

For a moment the abomination paused, cocking its head to one side as it regarded the priest, an almost quizzical look in its inhuman eyes. A breathless snorting noise escaping its flaring nostrils as its patchwork-flesh chest heaved. The stink that came off the beast - of blood and rot and death - could only be described as hellish.

The thing raised its multitude of limbs - one scythe-like claw held high above its head, some vile secretion oozing from the stump of another abominable limb - and the Reverend Creed knew that his time had come.

As the talon descended, Creed took a stumbling step backwards, the natural instinct for survival hard to deny. The tip of the claw caught the cloth of his cassock as he went down hard on his back, the lighted taper falling from his hands, the cast-iron candlestick beside him crashing to the floor, spilling hot wax across the stone flags and trailing fire.

The monster loomed over him, its hideous form a dark stain against the backdrop of the white-emulsion ceiling above, an evil shadow blocking out God's light. The musty, oily stink of its heaving flanks was hot in his nose and made him want to gag.

A human head supported on an elongated, snake-like neck descended, jaws dislocating as the mouth of hell itself yawned open.

Nathaniel Creed closed his eyes; his longed for end had come. The Lord God had seen fit to send his angel of death to take him from this world. And if he were to reside in hell for all eternity, then so be it; it could not be any worse than the living hell he had put himself through these last seventeen years.

Seventeen years since the boy's mother - the street girl whose path had first crossed his when she was barely past her eighteenth year, the same age the wretched boy was now - had turned up at his door again, the TB already too far gone for him to do anything for her other than hear her last confession, give her the last rites, and acknowledge the boy as his own, the result of his one transgression of the flesh.

He was dimly aware of a dull
whommph
and then he felt the fires of hell against his back.

Sudden scorching pain made Creed open his eyes. He found himself staring right into the gullet of the beast. But then, suddenly, the jaws snapped shut, mere inches from the end of his nose, and the blasphemy's old man's face recoiled. Creed could see the fires of hell reflected in the eyes of the demon now, and something else too. If he had not known better he would have named it terror. But what did an angel of the Abyss have to fear from a sinner like him?

Intense burning pain suddenly consumed him, and with it, the priest's addled senses returned. Screaming in pain and panic, Creed leapt to his feet, but he was already too late. His cassock was alight.

Screeching in fear - yes, it was fear that he had seen in the old man's eyes - the monster retreated, all eight legs taking a step backwards as it shrank from the preacher.

Creed took an agonised, shuffling step forwards, arms outstretched towards the beast. "'The Lord your God is a jealous god!'" he screamed, as fire clawed its way up his body with flickering fingers, the hair on his head curling and blackening before the advance of the flames. "'
The Lord revengeth, and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies!'"

Creed's shambling steps became more urgent as the fire spread. Eyelids burned, melting flesh sealing them shut, his tongue cooking in his mouth, his voice nothing but incoherent screams now, and he half-ran and half-fell towards the beast, seeking its awful embrace.

And fire consumed his soul.

Free of the remnants of the net at last Ulysses pounded down the path to the church no more than a minute behind the beast.

He reached the sundered door to be greeted by a chorus of unholy screams, bestial roars, and the snarl of hungry flames, the church's stained glass lit up in a brilliant rainbow of flickering light from inside. Ulysses grabbed the splintered door jamb to arrest his flight and stop himself falling headfirst over the threshold, rapier blade still in hand, adrenalin and Seziermesser's cocktail of miracle-drugs numbing his broken fingers.

His own subconscious warning scream had Ulysses throwing himself aside, so that he saved himself from being trampled underfoot by the fleeing monster. Trailing the charcoal-stink of the church's burning furnishings behind it, back in the chill embrace of another dull November morning, the Umbridge-chimera raised its face to the sky, the gyrating head performing a peculiar cobra-dance of its own, and sniffed the air. Then with a triumphant howl it set off at a gallop, back across the churchyard.

Ulysses hauled himself to his feet. He felt exhausted. He didn't know how much longer he could maintain the chase. But then if he didn't, who would? And besides, he could not -
would
not - let the beast to escape him again.

Turning away from the fire-lit interior of the church, Ulysses stumbled back along the path. But rather than return to the Abbey and the mob of policemen and circus folk awaiting it there, the chimera turned left past the east end of the church, heading out across the stone-planted field of St Mary's cemetery.

Ulysses rounded the end of the building after it and ran on, his lungs feeling like they were on fire, the monster galloping over the weathered tombstones and monuments that littered the graveyard.

And there, even further ahead, Ulysses could make out the running figures of Jennifer and the freak as they followed the cliff-top path towards the eastern extremity of the cemetery and its perimeter wall.

The creature was closing on them.

The intensity of the moment helping him to focus his mind on tapping the last reserves of energy his body possessed, Ulysses bounded along the well-trodden grass path between the gravestones, towards the crumbling cliff path.

The chimera was only a few lolloping strides from its quarry, its pounding footfalls sending shudders through the turf at Ulysses' feet. For Jacob and Jennifer it was only a matter of another ten yards to the cemetery wall. Soon there would be nowhere else for them to run, nowhere left to hide.

As the chimera bore down on them Jacob turned in a display of astonishing bravery, and with nothing but his bare hands, prepared to make a good account of himself in the face of the vivisect's attack.

The move obviously surprised the tiny part of the old man's mind that remained his own and the creature stumbled to a halt, in a confused flurry of lurching legs. As the creature reared up before them, preparing to make its mantis-like strike at last, Jacob took a bold step forwards, looked directly into the old man's leering face and let out a pained roar of anger, frustration and desperation.

For a moment, the bewildered beast withdrew its head. Then slowly its face came level with the boy's again. The chimera opened its gaping mouth and roared in animal fury, meeting the young man's challenge.

And Ulysses' blade fell.

The monster's roar of fury became a howl of pain as the razor-edged rapier sliced through one arthropod leg.

The howl became a scream as Ulysses pushed against the blade to prise the leg apart. With a horrible sucking sound and a popping crack, the lower part of the crab limb came away from the thigh-like merus. The shorn limb fell uselessly to the ground, trailing stringy white meat from the horny-joint, a watery grey fluid dribbling into the grass at Ulysses' feet.

The chimera wheeled round. Ulysses had its attention again. He took a wary step backwards.

He had faced the impossible hybrid three times now, and on every occasion so far the outcome had been inconclusive. However, they shared a mutual understanding now that this time neither would desist until one, or both of them, was dead.

Its old man's face contorting into a bellow, the chimera charged at Ulysses, hampered by the fact that it had lost one of its eight legs. This incapacitation gave Ulysses all the time he needed to prepare his next move.

The monster rushed in, gorilla-fist drawn back ready to take a swipe at the dandy while the long, disembowelling claw unfolded, ready to tear the man open from sternum to groin.

At the last possible moment, Ulysses launched himself at the beast, sprinting from a standing start to charge in under attack-raised arms. He slammed into the solid wall of muscle that was the vivisect's broad crocodilian midriff, forcing the tip of his sword-cane through the leathery epidermis and into the coils of viscera behind. Umbridge screamed again.

Only Doktor Seziermesser had known what manner of internal organs actually lay buried inside the fleshy shell of the monster's body. For all Ulysses knew his blade might have punctured a kidney, a lung, a stomach, the monster's heart - and who was to say that it only had the one? - or maybe he had even managed to sever a major artery.

Bullets might not have had much of an impact against the unnatural creature but good old-fashioned, tempered British steel - that was quite another matter!

Ulysses kept his hold on the pommel of the blade firm as the monster writhed and kicked, pushing him backwards, but the beast was unable to dislodge him despite its frenzied efforts. But then Ulysses felt strong hands grasp his shoulders, blunt fingers digging into his flesh, worrying at his old shoulder wound and threatening to tear the stitches where the ape's arm had been attached to his other shoulder.

Now it was Ulysses' turn to cry out, moaning through gritted teeth as he desperately tried to keep a hold of his sword. He might have managed to escape the reach of the chimera's larger limbs, but he had still been within reach of its smaller secondary arms.

And then his fingers slipped from the blood-slicked bloodstone-tip of his sword-cane and he suddenly found himself unable to defend himself against the monster's onslaught.

Ulysses had thought that nothing could top the horrors he had witnessed and experienced first-hand, the personal abuses he had suffered. But as his eyes snapped open, excruciating pain lancing through his aching body as the monster tugged at his left arm, he realised how wrong he had been.

For there, right in front of his eyes, the amalgamated flesh of the chimera was starting to bubble and blister. Ulysses watched as the patches of exposed skin began to sizzle and pop, as if its flesh had been subjected to a chemical attack - or as if something was moving beneath the skin. And then, as he peered closer, unable to tear his eyes away, despite the agonies he was suffering, he saw that there
was
something there beneath the shiny, translucent skin, a tiny something inside each and every blister.

Ulysses cried out again as the stitches securing the chimpanzee's arm to his shoulder began to tear and his eyes swivelled round to see for himself what was happening. What he saw filled him first with horror, then revulsion until that feeling too changed to become furious resolve. Seeing his own left arm worrying at the surgery that had been carried out as a result of its amputation gave him the strength and the determination to fight back.

Using the chimera's hold on him to support himself, Ulysses tucked his legs up to his chest and planted both feet firmly against the monster's reptilian abdomen. Tensing his thighs, he pushed with all the strength he had left. His body skewed to the left as the monster maintained its hold on his ape arm, the pain in his shoulder easing immediately, his right arm pulling free of the chimera's own blood-wet hand.

At once he reached for the beast again, swinging precariously from the stubborn grip of his own left hand. The shattered fingers of his right hand clutched at the old man's face and, making a paralytic claw of his maimed digits, he dug in.

The chimera gave voice to another scream - pain and fury indistinguishable now - and Ulysses felt something, soft and pliable as jelly, pop under pressure. With a sharp, spasmodic jerk, the abomination hurled Ulysses away.

For a moment Ulysses sailed through the cold air, both his left arm and shoulder feeling like they were on fire. He landed hard on his back, sliding over the dew-wet grass. He came to a halt - eyes shut tight against whatever terrible disaster might befall him next - and lay there for a moment, listening to the screams of the girl, the shouts of the boy and the incessant roaring of the beast. The salt sea breeze ruffled his hair and stung his face with cold.

Utterly exhausted, as he was, part of him felt like just lying there and doing nothing, waiting for the inevitable end to come, for the beast to take him. But he had hurt the creature now; he had it on the back foot. The advantage was his.

Ulysses tried to push himself up into a seated position and would have gone off the cliff backwards and into the sea, had it not been for the precarious fence that leaned out over the drop. He had come to a stop right on the very edge of the crumbling precipice, and when he had tried to put his hand down under the wire, to find some purchase, he had put all his weight on thin air.