They breached the compound perimeter at two opposing points and fanned out rapidly, making for the building at the centre, eagerly intent on killing anyone they confronted. Momentum was all with strike troops and every man of them knew it. You went forward. You did not ever take a backward step. Your progress was relentless and murderous and it did not falter until the target was seized and secured. Your very survival depended upon this impetus. The smell of cordite quickly filled the air. Rounds were fired in short, disciplined, staccato bursts by the troops to Hunter’s left and right. The return fire it provoked was wild and uncontrolled, promiscuous as the compound’s defenders spent a magazine with every burst they triggered. Hunter was aware of bullets zipping by him in the darkness, of their deadly weight and wasted velocity. He heard a mag clatter to the ground forty feet beyond where he progressed in a crouch and aimed a burst of fire in that direction, hitting something solid and provoking a grunt of surprise or pain. He was hit himself then, a hundred and forty pounds of attack dog slamming into him, putting him on the ground, winding him and attempting to bite out his throat. He raised his forearm and the dog clamped a jaw of bristling teeth around the limb and began to toss its head and tear. It made no sound. Its eyes were a dull, sightless crimson. The arm it held was Hunter’s left. He took his fighting knife from its scabbard on his right thigh and plunged it to the hilt into the neck of the dog. The animal merely tightened the clench of its jaw
on Hunter’s arm and he felt the skin puncture deeply and heard his own tendons start to strain and rip. There was a volley of automatic rifle fire, incredibly loud, right over him. The dog slumped and Hunter squirmed from underneath it. Gaul had been wrong. The animal stank like death itself. The blast of its breath in Hunter’s face had been the reek of a charnel house.
Peterson was over him, helping him to his feet. ‘None of this is right,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
Peterson was panting, sweaty. Over the cam cream it was smeared with his face was already filthy from the smoke of stun grenades and powder burn. ‘They’re taking rounds,’ he said. ‘But they’re not dying, Captain.’
As if to prove the point, on the ground, the dead Rottweiler twitched and shuddered like a beast stirred and summoned. Its guts lay glistening, spread where Peterson’s heavy calibre shot had spilled them. Hunter stared, incredulous and revolted. The twitching animal began to pull itself free of its own gore. Its eyes opened with a ruby glimmer.
‘Come on,’ Peterson said.
They approached the marquee. It was canvas, black and oily and taut. And it was the vaunting size, Hunter saw, of a cathedral. Guidelines as thick as tow ropes tethered it to metal stanchions pulverised deep into the ground but still proud above the earth to about the height of a man. They could discover no entrance. The firefight all around them was chaotic now. The resistance was impossibly stubborn. Momentum had been lost and, with it, the pattern of attack. There was no knowing enemy from friend. Behind him, as he looked in horror and something like awe at the massive structure in front of him, Hunter could tell from the grunts and screams that the conflict had descended into close-quarter duels fought hand to hand.
They had commanded eight men. They had possessed company strength in total of eleven. It was nowhere near enough. He wondered how many now were left alive. He judged they were no more than three or four minutes into their disastrously misconceived assault.
Peterson took out his knife and tore a long rent with it in the fabric in front of them. He pulled open the rip and gestured for Hunter to step beyond him inside. Hunter looked and saw that the tear revealed a blackness even inkier than the fabric that surrounded it. It was as though the interior of the canvas cathedral absorbed and swallowed light. He swallowed, wondering what they had blundered into, knowing he had no choice but to keep going on. He could smell the sour secretion of fear on the sweating Peterson. He could smell its sharpness on himself. But there was a pervasive odour, gathering in strength all around the compound. It was the corrupt stench of decomposition. It brought to his mind images of defiled and looted crypts and midnight resurrection men. He felt momentarily less like a soldier than someone colluding in desecration.
‘Go on,’ Peterson said, from behind him. There was raw urgency in the Canadian’s voice. They struggled through the tear in the fabric of their new, dark world.
Silence replaced the sound of martial carnage outside. It was completely quiet in the narrow, fabric corridor in which the two men found themselves groping. Orientation was almost impossible and as their eyes adjusted to the gloom, by the pinprick beam of Peterson’s tiny flashlight, all they could logically do was aim for the centre of the structure they had breached. It was very difficult. A maze of cloth corridors had been stitched into the marquee. They were narrow and claustrophobic. But their walls were taut, which was a mercy. Hunter imagined them slackening, their black canvas closing in and collapsing, the oily burden becoming
flaccid and descending upon them with its silent, suffocating weight. He was not generally prey to such thoughts. Fear and defeatism were strangers to him and he had never known a moment’s panic in his life. It was as though these feelings were a contagion he was picking up from the very fabric of the place he was in. He could not see the face of his comrade in arms. But he would have bet Peterson was prey to feelings at that moment identical to his. You had to fight the infection, he thought. It could unman you and leave you helpless without a strong and sustained effort of will.
They emerged eventually into a central chamber. It seemed vast, after the confinement of their maze of cloth corridors. Peterson chambered a round. It was an encouraging sound, a reminder of the Canadian’s bravery and belligerence and Hunter was glad of it. The man had saved his life, he realised then. But the thought was brief as what lay in front of them clarified in Hunter’s sight and mind.
The scene was candlelit. The light in the chamber was feeble and haphazard, the candle flames seeming to struggle to find the necessary air to feed their flickering life. Pools of illumination dabbed and spat at a figure at the centre of things. She was middle-aged and enormously fat. She was floridly dressed and heavily bejewelled. The light, from a distance, was not strong enough to see her clearly by. It was as though she waxed and waned in the light with the flickering life of the candle flames. She sat at a card table, Hunter saw, as he and Peterson approached. The cards on the table were dull tablets of colour. The game had been set for two players. There was a second chair, more accurately a throne, opposite the one the fat woman occupied. But it was empty.
Spacious tapestries were draped on hanging frames above the place at which the woman sat. Some of these showed figures. Some showed geometric shapes. The figures were neither human nor animal but at some subtle and unnerving
stage in between. They had uneasy expressions. To Hunter’s eyes, their features combined the cunning found in humankind with the primal malevolence of predatory beasts. The abstract tapestries were more disconcerting, he thought. It was as though in them, geometry, its laws and logic, was somehow undermined. They described sly, anarchic angles and structures. They mocked reason. They defied proof. He thought that you might go mad in their intricate study. Above them, remote on the black concave ceiling of the chamber, a constellation had been painted. But it was a constellation true to no night vista from the Earth. It was alienating, this strange nightscape. It made him feel abject light years away from home and what he knew and understood.
The seated woman turned her head towards Hunter. She wore a green satin turban shaped in complex folds. He knew with certainty that beneath it, she was bald. She opened her mouth abruptly, as if in a yawn so sudden it had surprised no one more than its originator. ‘There is something singularly charming about the river at that particular point, Captain,’ she said. She spoke in a high, clear voice and her accent was English and refined. ‘I can quite see why you chose it, with the curve and shimmer of the water towards the pale arches of the bridge. There is the verdant green of the island. There is the promise of the fun to come under elegant tents in the splash of the summer sun. It’s a lovely spot. There might be no lovelier along the entire length of the Thames. It’s a wonderful location for a sacrament and celebration. Magical, one might say. I know you agree.’ Her mouth snapped abruptly shut. Then she smiled. And the smile was the terrible invitation to share some secret joke.
‘What’s the old bitch talking about, Captain?’ Peterson said. He kept his voice deliberately low. ‘Sounds like a fucking travelogue.’
‘She’s just described the place where my wedding reception
was held a month ago,’ Hunter said. He was aware of being so dry-mouthed that his own voice sounded shrill, like one belonging to someone else entirely.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Peterson said.
The woman turned to Peterson. Hunter thought it had grown darker in there, the light even further diminished. The painted constellation above them grew remote, as though they orbited through space away from it. The figures on the tapestries were reduced to shadowy spectres. There was a glow to the old woman’s eyes that the candlelight could not explain or justify. This glimmer looked to Hunter like the external manifestation of some dark internal energy. He thought the vapid green glow in her eyes was generated by thought. She was a woman, if she was a woman, capable of willing things. Hunter had an instinct for danger honed over years of exposure to the risk of violent death. His hand was greasy with fear when he placed his palm over the butt of his sidearm. The metal felt cold and gnarled and familiar and not at all comforting. On the table, the cards in front of the woman began to curl and then to smoke and smoulder with a harsh stink.
‘You should not have interrupted our game,’ the woman said.
Peterson said, ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Miss Hall. That’s immaterial. But you have gravely offended my hostess, Mrs Mallory. And that is not immaterial at all. Goodness me, no. It is something you will greatly regret.’
On the other side of the chamber, beyond where Miss Hall sat enthroned, there was a whimper of noise. Hunter pulled his pistol free and released the safety. With the weapon in both hands, and giving Miss Hall a wide and cautious berth, he jogged towards the source of the sound. It was a prone figure in battle fatigues. It was Rodriguez. Blood was
smeared around the lower half of his face. Gore congealed in his moustache. He was unconscious and he was missing his hands. His hands had been severed raggedly at the wrists. His wristwatch, the strap still buckled, lay beside him on the floor.
‘Get over here,’ Hunter screamed at Peterson. ‘Morphine, field dressings. Do you have anything we can use to bind his wrists, stop the bleeding?’
‘Oh no,’ Peterson said. He dropped to his knees, spilled items of medical kit from the pouches on his belt. ‘What happened to him?’
‘One of the dogs,’ Hunter said. ‘A pack of them, maybe.’ He had cut a length from one of his bootlaces and was using it as a tourniquet, binding one of the Major’s wrists.
‘Not a dog,’ Miss Hall said, from her throne beside the card table away behind them. ‘Mrs Mallory was most put out when your commander interrupted our game. I’ve never seen her so angry. She said he would never play the piano with his daughter again. And nor will he. That was his chastisement. She made him eat his hands.’
‘Fuck this,’ Peterson said. He got to his feet picking his rifle from the floor where he’d put it to tend to Rodriguez. He turned and aimed it at the woman who termed herself Miss Hall. Hunter remembered he already had a round in the barrel.
‘No,’ he said. He reached and pushed the point of the weapon towards the floor.
‘How the fuck can she know that stuff about the major and his daughter?’ Peterson said. He was wide-eyed, hyperventilating, on the point of losing control completely. ‘How can she possibly know?’
‘Same way she knows about my wedding,’ Hunter said. ‘Let’s all try to live through this, Peterson.’
‘Point that weapon at me again, young man, and I will
have you turn it on yourself,’ Miss Hall said to Peterson. Her eyes switched between them. ‘The fault lies entirely with you. You have come here without invitation. You arrived with hostile intent. You have sabotaged something it took me years to arrange. Be thankful you were not here to experience Mrs Mallory and her wrath. I am sorry about your commander. But his chastisement was not my doing. Leave before I change my mind about allowing you to do so.’
Hunter said, ‘Where is Mrs Mallory now?’
Miss Hall grinned at him. Her teeth were large and yellow and too plentiful for her mouth. With a meaty shuffle of enormous thighs, she settled deeper into her seat. ‘You would not wish to encounter Mrs Mallory,’ she said. ‘Not with your marriage bed barely slept in, you wouldn’t, young man.’
Hunter had bound both of Rodriguez’ wrists, tightly, with his makeshift bootlace tourniquets. Either the ties or shock had staunched the bleeding. Bone protruded white in candlelight from the Major’s ragged wounds. He was deeply unconscious. Peterson had pumped two ampoules of morphine into him. Now, the big Canadian put Rodriguez over his shoulder. He handed Hunter his rifle. Hunter had lost his own rifle when the dog had felled him outside. Rearmed, he began to look around for an exit, for an escape route out of the waking nightmare they had blundered into.