Quatermass (8 page)

She started running, holding on to the dog’s collar. It bounded along with her. Quatermass grabbed the frightened children.

The line of Planet People did not seem to be making for the station entrance, he thought. They were moving as if to cross the railway track in the gap between it and the outbuildings. Their panting cry came back at him, half voiced, guttural. An ugly, wordless sound.

“Leh-leh-leheheh! Leh-leh-leheh!”

“Stop!” yelled Kapp. “You can’t come through here! Get back!”

Roach fired the shotgun over their heads. Then he swung it down.

“No!” screamed Clare.

She was running beside the column.

“Clare, keep back!”

“Joe, they’ve got kids!” She turned to the marchers. “He won’t let you through! Go round—another way!” She was up with the leader of them now, pointing aside. The young man seemed dazed, unable to comprehend, but at least he was slowing. The other Planet People bunched behind. Clare looked for any response from the haggard, painted faces.

“Turn back!” Kapp was shouting. “All of you, go back! You’re not coming in here!”

“Joe, wait!” Now she turned to their leader and asked: “Where are you trying to get to?”

He looked as if he was trying to retrieve it from the depths of memory. His lips formed it.

“Ringstone Round.”

Other voices agreed. The name ran among them. “Ringstone Round . . . Ringstone Round . . .” They were gasping for breath, many of them. Weary bodies sank to the ground. The chant died away.

Clare pushed through them to join her husband.

“Did you hear?”

Kapp nodded. He shouted: “You’ve come the wrong way! Go back! Turn round and go!”

None of them stirred. The pendulum was swinging backwards and forwards. Roach discreetly loaded one smoking barrel.

“You could get to it this way,” Clare said.

“Ringstone Round?”

She looked towards the hills out beyond the railway track. “I’m sure you could.”

“There’s no road.”

“But if you went straight across. It’s the right direction. Oh God, look at them!”

Swaying or slumped, lips twitching, they were unreachable. Their eyes rolled. A child whimpered, clinging to its mother. Dust had caked the blood on bare feet.

Clare called out: “Do you need anything? D’you want food? I might find some for you. Water?”

No response. They knew what they wanted. It lay ahead.

“Let them through, Joe.”

“It must be twenty miles,” said Kapp.

“It’ll be further if you send them back.” She dropped her voice. “For the sake of those kids at least.”

Kapp hesitated. He turned to Roach, standing with the reloaded gun. He knew what response he would get there.

“They won’t touch anything.” It was Quatermass who had come up. “They’re not even interested.”

True. They seemed too spent even to look up at the shining dishes above. Not a head was raised.

“All right.” Kapp called out: “Straight through, then! Don’t go near anything—don’t touch anything! Just get going!”

The Planet People obeyed.

In silence now, as if the halt had shaken them out of the rhythm of their breathing as well as their stride, they started to shuffle along. Even the weariest managed to pick themselves up from the ground. The line re-formed. It passed between the old waiting room and the water tank and crossed the platform. Some of the Planet People went sprawling as they jumped down on to the track. Now and then a precious bundle of food or clothing was dropped and forgotten as they ploughed on up the hill.

“Termites!” said Kapp.

The tail of the column disappeared across the further platform. It was over. A small crisis averted.

“Till next time,” said Tommy Roach. He applied his safety catch. That was the way it went. If something happened once it would certainly happen again. And the next time was always worse. They would have to do something about defences—

Kapp cried out: “Oh, no!”

He went running. The two little girls were squatting on the ground, absorbed in something. It was Debbie who had it, a crude pendulum consisting of a rusty iron nut on the end of a dirty string. He snatched it from her.

“Where did you get this? From them?”

He was shaking the child. She snivelled. Her sister pointed after the Planet People and said: “A boy gave it to her.”

Kapp hurled the thing away. He gripped Debbie’s little body tight.

“Those are mad people! They believe in mad things. You must never take anything from them—never! Never!”

Debbie screamed, not understanding, frightened of her angry father. When Clare picked her up she had wet herself.

Kapp walked over to where the rusty nut had fallen and kicked it out of sight. He looked sick.

“They made me do that,” he said.

4

A
lison Sharpe had not been in the observatory at the time. She was about a mile away, gathering acorns for coffee. There was a particular tree she favoured. The acorns it dropped were smaller but they tasted better. She always went to it.

While she filled her rush basket she heard a kind of singing.

She saw half a dozen young people dressed in loose ponchos, running lightly. It was not a song, she realized as they came closer, but a breathy chant.

“Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah!”

The boy leading them was swinging a plumb-bob. As he caught sight of Alison he called out to her: “Come with us!”

She did not know what he meant. “Where?” she asked.

“Ringstone Round! We’re going to Ringstone Round!” He caught her by the wrist to pull her along with them.

Alison was frightened.

She managed to jerk free. She ran. The basket fell and she lost the acorns as she made off.

She got back to the huts.

It was an hour before Clare could get the truth out of her. What had frightened Alison was not so much the Planet People as herself, the sudden urge to give in and run with them. Her mind had seemed to switch off, to go blank. Clever Alison succumbing to the sort of mindlessness she had always despised. It must have been hysteria. She despised that too.

Now she sat recovering. Sipping from a cup and trembling.

Clare left her and turned to the others.

“Why there?”

Joe almost spat. “Looking for magic! It used to be Stonehenge or Glastonbury Tor where the slobs went to wait for the end of the world! Now it’s the turn of Ringstone Round! They don’t use maps, of course—they’ve got to discover it for themselves with earth-trails and bobs! As if nobody had ever been there!”

“I went to see it once,” said Quatermass. “It was swarming with tourists.”

How long ago? Thirty years? Forty? He was with his wife and little . . . who, Hettie? Not Hettie, of course not. Hettie was still an undeveloped egg in the little child’s womb of her mother, who held her father’s hand,
his
hand, and licked at the ice-cream cornet he had bought her near the ticket office. The admission tickets were sixpence each and she had wanted them, to hold them, to possess something. He suddenly saw the small face looking up at him, the sticky fair hair. It was very hot that summer. The grass was brown, trodden flat by the tourists crowding the Round. The child had felt uneasy among so many bodies. She had run for a little among the great stones, but then wanted to go. A quick look at the megaliths . . . the two trilithons . . . the great hanging sarsen stone in the middle of the group . . . and they left. The little girl ran ahead of her parent waving thin arms, pretending to be some imaginary creature. A long way in time from the autobahn that was going to kill her. Not long enough.

“I know a rhyme about Ringstone Round,” said Sarah. She had been listening.

Clare nodded. “The nursery rhyme.”

“Do you know it?” Sarah asked Quatermass.

“Of course,” he said. “I remember teaching it to”—he hesitated—“to other little girls. How does it go? ‘Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round—’ ”

“Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round,

If you lose your hat it will never be found . . .”

She clapped her hand on her head to hold the imaginary hat in place. She said: “You have to do the things.”

“That’s right.” It came back to him with almost physical clarity. Another small figure was capering there in front of him and biting its tongue in concentration. Who was it, Hettie? Hettie’s infant mother? Hettie, he decided, when she was aged about five.

Sarah was tugging at her waist band.

“So pull up your britches right up to your chin,

And fasten your—your—”

“Cloak,” he said. He knew.

“. . . your cloak with a bright new pin—”

They finished the words together:

“And when you are ready, then we can begin,

Huffity, puffity, puff!”

Sarah sat back, pleased. She evidently felt she had made a point. In some obscure way, Quatermass felt he had, too, but was not sure what it was. He sat frowning.

“It must be windy there,” said Sarah.

“Yes,” he agreed, and looked across at Clare. He met an expression that puzzled him for a moment, until he remembered he had seen it before. It was when she had talked about her discoveries. A kind of hunger.

“It’s curious about nursery rhymes,” he said. “What else they may be telling us.”

Clare nodded. “Politics, I suppose. Wars, invasions. When, oh when, does little Boney come? P’raps he’ll come in August, p’raps he’ll stay at home . . . Sometimes he was just the Bone Man. That made him more sinister.”

Sarah was out of her depth. “What bone man, mummy?”

“Napoleon. I told you about him, didn’t I? Well, I will. And there was the brave old Duke of York, who had ten thousand men and marched them up to the top of the hill and didn’t know what to do next. And little Jack Horner, who hid valuable documents in a pie, he really did. And pulled out quite a plum. And King Georgy Porgy. And most of all there were the . . . sickness ones.”

She meant plague, of course, but she wouldn’t say it in front of the quick child. Memories of the Black Death and later visitations, transformed into pretty harmlessness. The chain of rising pustules . . . Ring o’ Roses. A pocket full of posies . . . attempted prophylaxis. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down . . . onset of pneumonic plague by droplet infection, followed by rapid collapse. It was all compressed there, symptoms and action taken, softened and rendered fit to be preserved as a memory, transmitted through the centuries of infants’ singing. Like nuclear waste set harmlessly in blocks of glass.

“Sometimes they were far older,” said Clare. “Eena, meena, mina, mo—”

“I know
that
one!” Sarah was sure of herself again.

“Of course you do.”

“It’s for counting.”

“Yes.”

“To make Debbie go out of a game. I mean—if she’s been bad or something. I mean, if it’s time for her rest. I mean, you can trick it.”

“Try it on the Stumpy Men,” Clare said. “It was theirs.”

“Eena, meena—?”

“The people who made them, anyway. That’s how they counted, or we think they did. Their words.” She turned to Quatermass again. “It’s true. Prehistoric numeration, a remnant.”

“You couldn’t do it on the Stumpy Men,” objected Sarah.

“Mm?”

“They wouldn’t go out of the game.”

“No, of course they wouldn’t, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Silly Mummy!”

Clare’s eyes were still on Quatermass. He was puzzled by the strange excitement behind them. Expectancy, that was it. There was something she wanted of him. If he had been young, young woman to young man, he would have known what it was. But young to old—

“Clare,” he said, “how far is it to Ringstone Round?”

He saw instantly that he had got it right. For some reason she had wanted the suggestion to come from him.

“Oh, it’s about half an hour, I think,” she said.

Now he had to go on with it. He crossed to where Kapp was frowning over technical diagrams. “Joe, would you mind—could we take a look at this place?”

“What?”

“Ringstone Round.”

Kapp muttered: “You mean now? I’m right in the middle of—look, Tommy’s over there waiting for me to—” He turned to Clare. “For God’s sake, why?”

So in spite of the diagrams, he had been listening to every word.

“It was the sight of those kids, wasn’t it?”

“Not just that, Joe—”

Quatermass said: “I’d like to see what’s going on. If you can spare the petrol. I don’t know, it just might be important.”

“How?”

“It’s possible.”

Kapp looked at Clare and she nodded. He glanced down at the diagrams again. They were going to go there, of course. There was no choice and he knew it.

“Okay.”

It was agreed that Alison should stay with the children. She was still too shaken to be able to perform much effective work on the correlation receivers.

The waggon had gone when Debbie got up, fat-eyed, from her afternoon sleep.

She felt cheated out of a ride when she heard about it, and became very disagreeable. She had chewed the photograph of Hettie almost to pieces—“That old man give it me”—and she waved the little straw figure challengingly at Alison. “My daddy give me this, it’s from London. It’s nicer than your kind!”