Quatermass (16 page)

The Planet People were everywhere, blundering and screeching. Like a huge wheeling flock of birds that had somehow got grounded, turning on itself. Panting columns tangled and collided. They ran along the railway lines, flung themselves past the station buildings, seemingly in a directionless frenzy.

Mad, mad, they’re all mad, thought Roach in the doorway. He had never seen people quite in this state, as if they had thrown themselves away and become less than the movement that had them, like leaves whirling.

“Frank!” he yelled and plunged after him.

Chen was nearly lost among them already. He turned for a moment. “I saw Alison! There—over there!”

He went running again and was gone. Roach gasped, nearly fell. He was being violently jostled, a fat middle-aged man swamped by the howling young. Hands caught him, pummelled him. For a moment he thought he was being attacked and fought back, swinging the gun barrel. He felt it hit bodies. Then the crush closed in, unaware and unseeing. He felt the gun trodden out of his grasp. He was being borne along, breathless.

The movement was carrying them steadily towards the mound.

For a moment the sheer pressure forced the fat man aloft and he saw. There must be countless hundreds of them. Already they were settling into a solid mass round the huts, surging over the mound, climbing on the stones there.

As he fell back among them he tumbled and went down. Feet on him, crushing the breath. Something cracked. Roach screamed but it made only a tiny vibration in the din.

“Leh-leh-leh-loh-loh-loh-lah-lah-lah—!”

Clare Kapp stood by the door of her home. Sarah was holding on to her, burying her face in Clare’s skirt. Debbie was crying, clinging to the Alsatian’s fur. The snarling of the animal had left them a small clear space.

“Go inside, mummy, go in!” Sarah whined. The words were lost but Clare knew the child was afraid. She could do nothing. She could only stand in her heavy daze, waiting.

“Joe?” Her hands were in Sarah’s hair, the fluff hair of a baby, the curls of a girl, and she was looking about for the man who should be here. “He’ll come soon, he’ll come!”

She had been frightened at first, when a stream of Planet People came and ran among the stones, screeching and perching like starlings. But the tension in her was relieved. It was all starting to happen. The confusion of mind that had grown so unbearable lifted a little. It was like the first drops of thunder rain falling and lightening the air for a moment, a sign of what is on the way.

Sarah had screamed at her: “Don’t take anything from them! Daddy said!” And Debbie had cried.

So many of them, and so fast arriving. She had been strangely pleased.

If Joe would come now there would be a completion in all of this. It was necessary he should be here, the father taking his place. The family together, the bread and the wine—

“Mummy!” screamed Debbie.

She had been flung flat. The dog had run. It leapt snarling and yapping as if it was in a fit, and then biting its way through the packed density of bodies. An animal suddenly crazed with terror.

The Stumpy Men had disappeared beneath the mob. The mound was a myriad waving arms and beseeching voices.

Kapp had found a can of oil. It was in the wrecked generator shed behind the sub-station. The vandals must have overlooked it. They would have emptied it away or used it for more graffiti.

It was only part full but might be enough. If it would just get him there he could fix the damaged sump.

He carried it over to the waggon. He freed the crumpled bonnet with some difficulty, thumping the clips with a stone. He pulled it up and started pouring the oil. It was thick and gluey as he had suspected. Drainings, probably, left by Frank after routine work in the past. Put tidily aside rather than foul some ditch with it. Frank felt strongly.

Old dead oil but it could get him home. Kapp was grateful. He poured carefully, not wasting a drop.

So it was several seconds before he noticed the light, the bright glow on the concrete behind him. It reflected on the waggon’s metal and on the grass all round.

He ducked out from beneath the bonnet.

He saw it through the trees, broken up by boughs and thickets. But it must be a continuous, vertical band. As he watched it thinned and brightened still more . . . and rose. For an instant it showed clear above the treetops, like lightning in reverse.

It was gone.

Kapp stood shaking, knowing. There was no question of what it had been, only of where. Impossible to guess how far away. He tried to think of the towns that must lie in the direction. Bath, if you went far enough, even Bristol. If it were a matter of towns.

He forced himself to go on pouring. The oil flow jerked under his hands. There was enough in now. He lowered the bonnet. He carefully stoppered the can and kept it and the gun with him when he got into his seat.

The engine fired in the end, explosive and harsh. He was moving.

He knew what he must do. He would make an agreement with his brain on what it was allowed to think about. He had done this on the hated trips to London when you never knew.

The engine groaned and mis-fired. He was pressing it too hard. He slowed.

“D’you think that next we ought to put in more winter cabbages?” she had asked him. “Or shall we stick to kale?” He hadn’t given her a proper answer at the time. He would think about it now. The kids didn’t like kale, no matter what you did with it. They complained about the taste and said it was stringy. Well, it was a fibrous, coarse crop, but you could rely on it no matter how bad the weather. And of course the kids didn’t like cabbage much either. So next season—

Brittany, Marshall had said. Did that mean Carnac, could he have meant Carnac with its avenues of megaliths? And in Indonesia, were there megaliths? Answer, yes, there could be, they’re one of the prehistoric basic facts, found just about everywhere on earth. The Stumpy Men—

More potatoes. Certainly more of them, they would grow a couple more rows. The kids liked them baked, liked to hold the hot spuds in their hands to warm them at supper when the weather was cold. When the winter days came—

Ringstone Round meant nothing, in itself nothing. It was just an accident they were there! A dot on a map, it could have been any other dot they happened on. Carnac, all right, if it
was
Carnac and its stones, it was the cult, they always headed for such places.

The Stumpy Men.

Soon it would be planting time for the winter vegetables. He mustn’t leave so much to her this time. It was so easy, she said, she enjoyed it. She would always take it on. A real
baleboosteh.
One of the old man’s favourite words, he didn’t know so many as he liked you to think, and he probably got them wrong. But that was one of them, “Your momma, Joe—a real
baleboosteh
!” Not so much a description of the woman as your own pride in her. Home-runner, fixer, maker, mother—

If there was no crowd, no swarming, it couldn’t happen!

Fact!

So no danger!

The engine coughed and died. Overheating again. Let it cool off. He got out to open the bonnet.

It was windy in a strange way, sharp and gusty. The twilight was darkening. A few fields away he caught a glint of metal, a stretch of the abandoned railway line. The section where it turned twisty, useless for antenna bogeys.

Now he had his bearings. He looked to where Gratton Halt must be, but it was on the far side of low hills.

He sat on the crumbling wall in iron discipline. This had been decent farmland but the farmers had gone. Too many beasts stolen and crops burned.

You could keep animals close to the huts, though, lock them up at night, repair the fences. More goats, some donkeys perhaps, to work and for the kids to ride on. Not cows. Cows were courting trouble, too much of a target . . .

He released the hissing radiator cap, filled up with water. Poured more precious oil.

The waggon re-started.

It was like driving a cart over cobbles now. Shuddering and clattering. If he ever got it back he would have to strip the engine completely. Frank would help, would manage to make up spares for the broken parts. There must be broken parts by now, all rattling—

He nursed it along mile after mile. At least no Planet People ran across in front of him now.

No Planet People.

None.

As it grew darker he switched on his headlamps but only one of them worked. He peered out through the flaking windscreen.

The bends in the road were becoming more familiar. He passed the abandoned barn.

Nearly there.

It was calm now, a pleasant evening. A long stand of trees towered over the road. Beckett’s Wood, the local people called it in those early days here when there still were local people.

Barricade! In London it would have been one, but here it was only leaves. He could see them piled two or three feet deep across the road. And that was strange. Like a great autumn drift, but these leaves were green. The waggon bumped and spun its wheels through their wetness.

The smell of the hot engine was more unpleasant. The last of the oil must be dribbling away in acrid fumes.

It wasn’t the oil . . . !

Kapp slammed his foot down. The engine screeched and he was swaying along the stony track.

Branches showed bare against the sky.

Not to think now, not to think, just to get there.

The headlamp picked up something on the track ahead, not leaves this time, not green. A bulky sack . . . but it was not a sack. He braked. The engine coughed out.

He ran to look.

“Puppy!” It must be the dog because of the head with the great teeth. But Puppy was strangely curled. Not curled but dead with the skull sprouting from the backbone like a chimera. Fur and flesh and bone run together.

All beyond was ruin.

Grey flocculent dust on the track, wind-blown, sparkling and shaking slightly in the light from the waggon.

Kapp knew.

It would be possible to avoid it. To turn away and keep going until you were safe in the hills and hide. But that was never an option.

He left the waggon where it was and started running straight along the track. The dust rippled away from his feet and he could hear the earth seething.

He could see the mound. There was enough light to make out the megaliths. They seemed squatter than usual, from the dust drifted round them. Here and there he caught the gleam of metal, of fallen plumb-bobs.

He saw the huts now.

He could make their black shapes out distinctly and they looked whole, untouched. And beyond them the station buildings, the twin antennas.

No lights. There should be lights by now.

As he ran on, items came whipping in to form an idea, fast as they always came. It wasn’t like the previous time. Metal, corrugated iron roofing, might make all the difference. Deflect and protect.

The vegetable patch had gone, all flat beneath the dust. No sign of the goat. No lights.

Out of breath, he was at his own front door.

“Clare!” he called, not daring to touch it because even in the dimness he could make out that it looked different.

Then he did touch it. The whole timber wall came fluttering down, showering him with tiny flakes.

The hut was a shell.

The far wall had gone completely and much of the roof on that side. Only dangling scraps were still attached here and there, unrecognizable as timber. A piece drifted down weightlessly in front of his eyes.

He took a step or two inside.

He could make out a few shapes. The iron stove, a lamp. Nothing that ran or looked or spoke.

He stood without moving for a very long time. It had grown darker when he looked round.

“Clare,” he said. “Sarah. Debbie.” He must say the names now or he would never be able to say them again.

8

A
nnie Morgan had got off the motorway well before darkness came. Soon she was driving through potholed streets that had been the cosy outer suburbs of London.

The radio was working. A newsreader was giving out the loaded phrases of a bulletin.

“. . . But it is confidently hoped that supplies of flour will be available by the beginning of next month. In Dublin today Colonel William Corcoran declared that the All-Ireland Protestant Junta will stay in control and no elections will be held in the immediate future . . .”

“You see?” said Annie. “No better than us!”

“. . . Lastly, an official denial of rumours concerning the stone monument of Ringstone Round . . .”

Quatermass turned to her in surprise.

“. . . that some form of electric storm caused casualties among people visiting the spot. No such weather conditions have been reported. Now, tomorrow’s power cuts. Eastern England . . .”

He switched it off. “They know,” he said.

Annie nodded. Of course, it was the standard reaction to any happening, deny it, hide it, change it. But if they really had the full facts and had been at work on them—

“This isn’t going to be easy,” she said.

“Do all you can.”

“Rule one, a District Commissioner is supposed to stay in her district. Never mind.”