Quatermass (12 page)

It got through then.

“The kids?”

“They’re inside. They’re okay. But—Joe—”

Kapp had stopped listening. The quick anxious flash was over. He was moving round to the back of the waggon to help with the injured girl. She gave a little disordered cry as she was lifted out. She clung to Clare.

“Who’s that?” asked Chen. “Who is she?” But there was no way to begin explanations now. “You go in first,” Kapp said to his wife. “Talk to the kids. Alison’s cleared off, Frank says.”

They could guess why.

The children seemed to detect a strangeness in Clare as she approached them. They had been eating, she could see. Debbie’s face was smeared. They must have helped themselves from the pantry.

The dog came towards her, wagging its tail but not certain of her either. It sniffed. The acrid air of that place must have clung.

She hugged the children tightly. It felt like breaking a spell.

“Where did Alison go? Did she say?”

“She just went,” said Sarah. “She said, Puppy’ll look after you.”

“And he did!” Debbie turned to the Alsatian and dug her hands into its coat. “I love Puppy. When I’m big I’m going to marry him!”

Sarah was watching her mother. “Did you see Ringstone Round?”

“Yes,” said Clare. The strangeness closed in again. “We’ve brought somebody. She’s sick, so . . . I want you to take your plates out to the back now. Sarah, take Debbie.”

She hurried them away just in time.

Quatermass appeared in the doorway with the whimpering girl in his arms.

“Which way?”

Clare hurried ahead up the few steps. He steadied himself and hefted the frail body in the rug. His breathing came fast, just with carrying her from the waggon. He mustn’t slip on the steps. He jabbed his heels down.

There were few rooms in the hut. The door that Clare held open must be Debbie’s. A tiny child’s bedroom with a litter of treasures hung on the walls . . . beads, strange twigs, straw figures, knitted toys that had been long in use and were pulling apart.

He lowered the child into the opened bed. Clare drew the car rug away.

The saw the leg.

Elephantiasis was the word that sprang into Quatermass’s mind. The wrong word, memory throwing it up, playing tricks. The word for slow tropical disease. And now that he looked again it was less shocking. He was sure of only one thing—it had not been like that when he found her.

“So swollen,” Clare said uneasily.

Distended, that was the word. Swollen was wrong, inaccurate.

“A lot of pain,” he managed to say.

But there seemed to be none. No reaction to the touch of the sheet or the weight of bedclothes, or to being moved and settled. She was quiet now.

“I’ll dress it,” said Clare. “I’ll manage.”

A confident crispness now.

“A hospital?”

“What hospital?” she said. “I’ll just move Debbie in with Sarah. It’ll be all right. I’ll look after her.” Her voice sounded almost bright. “I’ve had a lot of practical experience with my own two. Seeing them through . . . childish illnesses.”

As if neither of them had seen what was under that sheet. She was reducing it to what she could bear, Quatermass thought.

He watched her crouch beside the low bed. She stroked the girl’s thin cheek. “You’re safe,” she said, “I know what to do.”

Quatermass turned to the door.

Telling it had been almost too much for Kapp. He stood silent while Tommy Roach went to the first-aid cupboard and found the emergency bottle.

But the glass slipped from Kapp’s hand and the precious whisky was spilt, wasted. He stared at his stiff fingers.

“Look at that. Bruised right through to the bone. On the wheel.” They were gripping again, as when he was driving.

“Whatever you saw,” said Roach, “I think we did too.”

“You?”

“The dishes picked it up. A massive overload.”

“It seemed to cheat the fail-safe,” said Chen.

“We could have lost the lot.”

Joe Kapp nodded. It tallied. He turned to the familiar apparatus as if it had the power to save sanity. Whatever facts it had managed to hold on to, it would not forget them now. They could retrieve them.

“All right, we’ll run all it got,” he said. “Heuristic mode, ask it for some guesses.”

“A lot of data wiped out,” said Roach. “It was the sheer weight—”

“Something to build on, that’s all we need at the moment.”

Roach had already been busy. He had processed much of the usable material. Now they could include a new parameter, the direct observations, on site, of Dr. Joe Kapp. There were some elegant ways of translating sense experience to the mathematical.

When Quatermass appeared they were wholly absorbed.

“Bernard, they got it even here! A shock wave must have hit the whole area—we’re going to try and analyse—” Kapp’s voice had taken on a bright detachment.

Quatermass had seen this kind of reaction before.

“Forget it, Joe,” he said, “for the moment.”

Kapp stared at him. “You don’t understand, we’ve got some real data now. We’re going to use everything that came into the software in the last twenty-four hours and—”

Quatermass caught his arm. “I think you ought to get home.”

Kapp shook his head. His mind was on the control panel. “I’m okay. I can carry on.”

“I’m not worried about you.” This time Kapp caught the unease in his voice. He stared at the old man. Quatermass repeated: “I think you ought to. I’m worried about Clare, that she—”

Then Roach cut in.

“Of course! It’s just come to me!” It was almost a cry of triumph, as if the very sight of Quatermass had jogged some link into place. “Last night, the Spacelab smashup—that could have been the same!”

Kapp had no time for mystery. “What are you raving about?”

“Loss of communications, sudden overload, total malfunction. Suppose all that was simply a side-effect? Like ours here today?”

“More, Tommy. Make it quick.”

“Suppose the Spacelab had taken—well, call it a sideswipe? From—from whatever this is. And all the time the real target would have been somewhere on the surface of the Earth? Don’t you see?”

He shouldn’t look so pleased with himself, thought Quatermass. It’s all very well to be right, but—

“Another Ringstone Round?” said Kapp.

“Yes! Somewhere—God knows what part of the world—that’s what was being hit!”

Kapp looked at Quatermass. “Last night.”

“It could have been, Joe.” Chen was nodding as well.

“I mean,” Roach went on, “it’s an idea, that’s all it is, but—”

Quatermass had to cut this short. He said: “Another part of the world? There’d be reports of it by now. Even here, they’d have to say something. The radio?”

Kapp found an amplifier switch. Tommy Roach shook his head. He knew. He had tried. Kapp punched up channel after channel but the roar of interference was always the same. The earth had sung beneath them at Ringstone Round. It was still in a state of shock.

In the pitch dark they made their way along the track to the hut.

As he opened the door Kapp saw the candles. They had been set in the sockets of the seven-branched candelabrum, the menorah.

It was a delicate, silver piece. An heirloom. The candles were home-made out of tallow. Just two of them.

“She’s set it out,” said Kapp. “We’re not religious but, just once in a while . . . there are times when you feel . . . yes.”

“Like tonight.”

“Clare?” Kapp looked about for her.

She must be in the bedroom again.

Kapp rambled on: “The old Jewish thing, it was always concentrated in the home. A bit of cosy ritual to make safe. See there, a candle to stand for each child. And there’s supposed to be wine set ready, bread all covered. That’s if you do it properly. My old man, he was a stickler for the detail.” He turned to a cupboard. “All I’ve got is this. Stuff I made and it’s not so good. Chateau Kapp, blackberry, I think—”

As he turned with a bottle in his hand his breath caught. “I keep forgetting. Just for a moment, like dropping asleep and then waking. And remembering. Do you find yourself doing that?”

Quatermass gave him a warning look. The children were coming.

They had apples and bread in small baskets, evidently a task they had been given to keep them out of the way. As they put these on the table, Sarah was itching with curiosity. “Why won’t mummy say? She always says about things and she won’t.”

Debbie asked Quatermass: “Did the wind blow?”

It took him a moment. “Yes,” he said.

She was pleased to have been right. “Like in the rhyme?”

“Yes.”

Then Clare came down the steps. At the bottom she turned quickly as if she had heard some cry. But there was nothing.

“All right for now, I think.” She went to the table. They took their place, Quatermass opposite the two little girls. Their mother solemnly lit the candles.

Debbie giggled at the sight of the flames. “ ‘Huffity, puffity, puff—’ ”

Kapp grasped her by the hand. Then he frowned. Clare had brought out a third candle. She lit it from one of the others and set it, too, in a socket of the silver menorah. And now she passed her hands quickly across the flames, one by one, towards her own body. As if each flame were a child and she were guarding it.

“Now we eat,” she said.

The bread was passed round. Kapp poured the wine and sat watching his wife. However vaguely remembered, the ritual was real and important to her now.

The children were not hungry. They had spoiled their appetites earlier. But Kapp suddenly found himself ravenous. He tore at his bread and choked pieces down, gulping the wine—

“Daddy!” Sarah screamed.

She pointed.

Something was moving in the dimness at the top of the steps. A white face, sharp as a rodent’s, was shaking and twisting about as it tried to find direction. From the lips, as if that would help, came a gulping, breathy attempt at a chant.

“Leh! Leh! Leh!”

Feeble as she was, she had dragged herself there. A sheet was still tangled round her, trailing behind.

In a moment Clare was running up the steps, to turn her and lift her and carry her back to the bedroom.

Kapp started after them.

At the top of the steps he heard something that froze him.

There were two voices. Chanting together.

“Leh! Leh!”

The thin mad sound was still going on as he got to the bedroom. Clare was settling the little shuddering thing back, keeping her head close to the girl’s as if to pass the sound to her.

“Leh! Leh! Leh! Leh!”

It died away. Clare turned to where he was staring at her. She whispered. “For her sake, I had to.”

But he could only go on staring at his wife as if he had caught her with blood on her mouth.

Exhaustion kept Quatermass asleep for several hours. Then he sat up in the uncanny bed and was frightened for his mind because he did not know where he was. The window in his bedroom had moved and shrunk. There were wrong shapes about. A loom . . . a rocking horse. Then he remembered it all.

The makeshift bed was soft enough but there was no sleep now. From time to time he heard soft mutters and patterings in the hut. He wondered whether he should go to help but decided not. They would call him if they needed him.

He dozed. The familiar dreads came and went as they always did. A half-mechanical ghost-creature rose up at him out of the deep ground. A man walked by with a pot-plant become part of his forearm. But then he was running among the stones of Ringstone Round, and all his limbs were growing hard as glass so that the joints squeaked with brittleness, and a young mugger came at him with brass knuckles and he knew what would happen—

He was walking in the country with his wife. It was the time when they had Benjy and he was with them, a terrier of no serious kind. All at once he began to bark. It was troubling because he seemed to be barking at nothing. Also because he was barking much too loudly for so small a dog. It would be bad for his throat. He must be stopped before he did himself an injury—

Quatermass woke.

The Alsatian was leaping at the back door of the hut, which seemed to shake with its shattering, raucous barks. Joe Kapp was there. He opened the door and the dog rushed out.

“Planet People! Go on, boy!”

Only half a dozen of them this time but too many for Kapp. He watched them scatter and run at the sight of the dog, their ponchos flying.

“Call him off! Don’t let him hurt them!”

“What?”

“Joe, don’t!” Clare was standing there in her night things. “Please!”

Kapp unwillingly went to whistle the dog back.

She picked up a hot kettle from the stove and started towards the stairs.

“The girl?” Quatermass managed a kind of whisper. “How is she?”

“Alive.” She had not wished to be asked. Clearly, she had not slept. Her face had dark hollows running beneath the pallor. He hardly heard her when she added: “You’d better come and see. It’s in the other leg.”

He grabbed his coat to pull round him.

When he saw he was sure.

Not even whisper it now, breathe it. “I think she’s dying.”

“No!”

“Those tremors.”

“The shock.”

All right, if she wanted to believe that let her, for a little longer. Quatermass was remembering the half disintegrated beings at Ringstone Round, those curdled ruins over whom the cry had gone up: they didn’t make it!

He looked at the shuddering little shape in the child’s bed.

She hadn’t made it either.

“It’s Annie Morgan!” Kapp shouted.

An old Land-Rover came bumping along the track. It was not well driven, as it circled and squealed to a halt near the hut, but then it was probably difficult to drive. As usual all windows were covered with mesh and it bore a mass of heavy steel reinforcement. On its front door was the royal crest, and in official script
District Commissioner.

Kapp ran to meet it.

The woman who got out was in her forties, plainly dressed and sturdy. Her face was kind and dogged, a little desperate now.

“Dr. Kapp—Joe—these Planet People kids, they’re everywhere! They’re half mad. I’ve been on the road since first light and, oh, a dozen times it’s been get out, get out of the way! And pray to God they will! What’s happening to them?”