Nailed by the Heart (39 page)

He
positioned the goldfish bowl, then peered in through the plastic.

"Take
fish thing away ... Nathty." That's what that big silly girl had
kept saying. "Nathty fish thing. Ah-ah don't like it. Don't
like it, not one little bit." The girl was as big as a grown-up;
but she had a little white face and a little kid's voice. "That
fish thing. ... take it away, David... or... or I won't marry you."
Then she had made that silly grin.

He
knew only vaguely about the word "marry." That's when two
people lived together.

Me
and Rosie Tarn worth, he thought with disgust. No way.

Even
so. He'd carried the goldfish out of the caravan. Across the
courtyard with the big guns near the gates, smelling of smoke
(something had happened but the grown-ups were keeping secrets; so
could he).

He'd
moved the goldfish partly because he was fed up with Rosie moaning
all the time, and partly because he no longer liked the look of it.

He
pressed his fingers lightly against the plastic bowlful of water. It
felt warm. Like a cupful of warm milk.

He
looked more closely but he couldn't see much. The room was half full
of light and half full of darkness.

"Gloomy,"
he mouthed as he stared, the blue-soldier gas bottles standing to
attention behind him. It was very quiet. No one about.

The
water in the fishbowl had gone green. The color of water in toilets
when you wee in it. Inside there were pebbles covering the bottom.
Once they had been white and pink; now they had gone a slippery green
color. The little wrecked pirate ship and then the-

He
started back. He'd not noticed what it had been doing.

The
eye...

He'd
not liked that... the eye had shocked him.

The
goldfish had been staring at him with that big around eye. No ... He
didn't like his fish at all now. It had changed.

When
they had won Clark Kent on the hook-a-duck at the fair it had been
little and cute (his mum had said). Now it wasn't cute at all.

In
the last few days it had changed.

It
had become a big, lumpy thing now. So long it couldn't straighten its
body in the bowl. Mostly it moved in fast jerks around and around the
bowl.

And
it reminded him of one of those cartoon snakes that had swallowed
lots of bugs, their long bodies going all bumpy from the big lumps
inside pushing against the skin as if wanting to burst out. Maybe
that would-

"David!"

"Mum?"

"What
on earth are you doing in here?"

"I
was just-"

"You
know it's dangerous with those things in here." She nodded at
the soldier gas bottles in their blue uniforms. "Come on."
She wasn't smiling. "Let's see if we can find anything to eat."

Without
looking back at the staring goldfish, he went to his mum as she stood
in the dark doorway, her hand outstretched.

On
the coast road he rode the bike into a fog that rolled in a swollen
white cloud down from the dunes.

Easy,
Mark. He throttled down to thirty.

He
had still not seen a single Saf Dar.

He
had covered a mile along the road, the scenery unchanging. Dunes
rising to the left of him. Swamp to the right.

The
mist thickened. He dropped the speed to twenty.

The
engine ticked smoothly, the vibration making his feet, buttocks and
hands tremble.

Then
something took shape out of the fog in front of him.

A
dark line.

They
had replaced the barrier of rocks and pebbles in the road. He had
gambled that they had left the road clear when they had created a gap
to allow poor dead Wainwright through in his car to drive at the
seafort gates.

But
the Saf Dar had been too smart for that. They had probably directed
their corpse-slaves to replace the stones.

He
braked, slowing the bike to a walking pace. Not wanting to stop, just
in case. ...

He
shook away the mental pictures coming into his mind.

You've
got three options, Mark, old son. Up into the dunes. Risky. One of
those things might be lurking in one of the hollows.

Next
option: ride around the causeway the other way. That means going into
the marsh. Risky again. Too easy to get bogged down and drown the
motor in marsh slime.

Option
three: straight over the top of the mound. The temptation burned
simply to charge the mounded barrier and hope that like a ramp it
carried him over in a mighty leap. He chose caution. He would ride up
to it, then simply lug the bike over.

The
barrier was little higher than his waist. He should be able to do it.

The
edges of the barrier became more defined as he neared it. Fifty yards
away he saw a large rock rising up from its middle.

Ten
yards later he realized that the big rock was in fact one of the Saf
Dar, squatting Red Indian-like on the mound. It faced Mark, watching
him approach through the mist, those large eyes lasering through the
fog as if it wasn't there. It had watched him approach. It knew.

Half
turning in the road, front tire pointing to the marsh, he stopped.
What now?

The
red thing on the stones could as easily hammer the life out of him as
he could that of a fly. Feet planted on the road on either side of
the bike, the big man raised himself from the saddle. In the fog
beyond the barrier he could make out another shadow shape rising out
of the mist. Up on the dunes, another. Like ghost statues. Waiting.

No
way out that way.

He
revved the bike gently.

This
couldn't be the end of the road-literally. He bit his lip. He had to
go on. The people in the seafort, hungry and exhausted now, clung
desperately to the idea that he was going to get help. They needed
him to do it.

Mark
turned his head in jerks, looking ahead along the road to where the
barrier and the Saf Dar blocked his route; he looked up at the dunes,
across at the marsh, then back along the road the way he came.

And
he wondered in God's name what he should do.

"Not
long now." Chris, Ruth and David had the caravan to themselves
as they ate their small helpings of chips, tinned tomatoes and one
beefburger. The rest of the villagers ate the same meal in the
gundeck room.

"How
long, do you think?" asked Ruth, half anxious, half excited.

"A
couple of hours-not much more. As soon as Mark gets through he'll
tell them--"

"The
truth?"

"Some
plausible cock-and-bull story ... half true anyway."

"What's
Mark telling who?" asked David, confused but sounding happy
because his parents were.

"Listen,
kidda," said Chris, "Mark's going to arrange a surprise.
We'll be going for a little trip somewhere and guess how we'll be
going?"

"By
boat?"

"Nope."

"By
car?"

"Nope
... Give in? By helicopter."

"Helicopter?"

"Chris
..." Ruth signalled to him with her eyebrows-Cool it, Chris.
"We don't know for sure yet."

"It's
a good bet, though." Chris felt good. "That way they can
get us out safely. We can leave all this for someone else to clear
up."

Ruth's
smile paled. "Just hope he can get through."

"Don't
worry, love. He'll get through. This time I'm optimistic."

Mark
was far from optimistic.

There
was no way he could continue with the bike. Although the red man on
the barrier of stones had not moved so much as a millimeter, he knew
it would pounce the moment he got near.

Still
astride the bike, he walked it backwards until the back tire left the
road and hit the first slope up to the dunes.

"Hell..."

He
hissed the word through clenched teeth.

Slipping
the bike into first gear, he revved the engine until it roared with a
fury that matched his own. He let out the clutch.

The
rear wheel buzzed like a chainsaw on the rough grass and sand,
sliding the bike sideways; then the tire bit into the tarmac,
rocketing the bike forward across the road and out onto the swamp.

More
through wild, shot-in-the-dark luck than anything else, the bike ran
out across a long spit of tussocks which penetrated deep into the
marsh in a long bumpy pier. Behind him the road, dunes and the Saf
Dar on the barrier disappeared into the fog.

He
slowed the bike to a crawl, thinking fast.

For
Christsakes, the marsh might not be the impassable stretch of mud and
shitty water he had first thought it. Working from tussock to tussock
(they were firm enough to support the bike) he might be able to cross
this miserable swamp.

The
marsh was some two miles wide. Then it began to rise imperceptibly to
form a rather soggy pasture populated by a few wet-foot cows. Beyond
that it became cultivated fields. His hopes rose. Fields wouldn't
present much of a barrier. Another four miles or so and he would hit
another road into Munby. With even more luck there might be an
isolated farmhouse, maybe even a pay phone. Then a single telephone
call and all this shit would be at an end.

He
pushed the bike on across the lumpy turf. At little more than walking
pace, he steered carefully, avoiding the pools of water-most no
larger than table-tops. Worst were the expanses of near-liquid mud,
punctuated here and there by tussocks that looked like the flattened
heads of drowned men partly breaking the surface.

He
nailed his attention on the wall of fog that seemed as solid as
concrete.

He
had moved perhaps a quarter of a mile along the narrow ridge of
tussocks, little wider than a footpath, mudflats to his left and
right, when he saw the shape solidify out of the mist.

There
was no way back. Only on. He rode toward the shape that reared out of
the marshy ground like a rotten tree stump.

It
was a human figure.

Or
at least it had been.

Once.

Tony
said, "You know, Chris, I think when they invented electric
light it killed off all the ghosts. Now we've lost the electricity
the bloody ghosts are coming back again." He glanced up the
gloomy stairwell. "There's a lot more shadows lately. ... You
noticed?" He said it with a smile, but Chris realized that the
man wasn't joking.

Chris
leaned against the corridor wall drinking a pale yellow liquid he'd
told everyone was tea (two teabags between twenty-five people). At
least it was hot.

Tony
sat on the stone steps. A cigar he'd half-heartedly crushed under his
muddy shoes sent out a trail of blue smoke.

"I
never used to believe in ghosts," said Tony. "When people
used to tell you a real ghost story. ... Laugh? I used to piss
myself. ... Rubbish. Now ... a bloody old cynic like me... Over the
last three years everything I believed in turned upside down."

Chris
nodded in a way he intended to be reassuring. Tony was exhausted. He
could be allowed his halfcoherent ramble.

"Tony,
remember the night we met in the pub? Me, you and Mark?"

"Jesus
... Do I... Seems like half a bloody lifetime ago now."

"Afterwards,
when I walked home along the top of the dunes ... To put it simply-I
met something."

"Something?
What? One of the Saf Dar? Or one of the poor bastards they've got
dangling on the end of their strings?"

"Neither.
It's hard to put into... No, to be honest I can't put it into words.
Only I met something. I thought I was hallucinating. Later. But it
had an enormously powerful effect on me. The equivalent of some kind
of psychic locomotive slamming into your mind."

Tony
sat up straight now. "Tell me about it."