Ladies From Hell (23 page)

Toward evening, we reached the sea; and once more I tried, as far as my bemused state would permit, to recognize the place to which we had come. It seemed at first I was once more looking at the Chesil Bank; certainly there were lagoons, bird-dotted, ruffled by the wind, lit by a steely light. Yet I saw no curving offshore beach; the land ran out in ragged spits into the harsh water. A humped headland was crowned by the keep of a barbaric castle. Banners flew from it, dark against the eerie light; stockades surrounded it, ringed with torches. Other twinkling spots of light stretched into distance; the campfires of a massive army. Its din reached up to us, mixed with the droning of the wind.

The cart halted finally before a hide-stitched tent. A fire burned outside it, lighting the interior, the poles on which the leather was stretched; there were cooking pots, a straw-filled hassock, a little folding stool. Boulter had left us, on some errand of which it once more seemed I had foreknowledge. I supported, or half-lifted, the girl from the cart, sprawled exhausted on the straw; and she pulled me to her.
And now, certainly, the nature of the entire experience declared itself; for my knowledge of her was sweet beyond all possibility of earthly fulfilment, sweet with the sweetness of the dream-life itself. Here at least, for an instant, I was master of myself, one with the green-eyed, lovely youth; and one too, in a way I cannot adequately begin to explain, with all I had done and seen in those few hours that had seemed so rich; the boutique, the hat with its bright blue kerchief, the mill race and the trees, the high, golden down. I knew—how curious this seems now—that as she moved against me so the fern fronds dipped and swayed, the water poured, folk woke and slept and laughed, the bright clouds sailed the sky. Till she lay laughing contentedly while I asked myself, again with the clarity, the sweet logic of dreams, why the actions performed should ever have seemed, in God’s world, fraught with guilt, with uncertainty, with doubt; so simple, so inevitable had her responses seemed. It was as if, for the first time in my life, something had been given to me, given truly without condition or reserve; but the rush of emotion the idea brought in its wake is something on which I no longer choose to dwell. For it was borne in on me, in that same instant, that whatever I had learned, I had learned too late.

Sometime, Boulter returned. The sadness that had infected me seemed to have touched him also. I remember his face, in firelight and darkness, as he sat and talked; but for the life of me, no words. And I was subsequently further confused by finding that his memories of the experience, in so far as he was able to recall them, tallied at almost no point with my own. But it seemed the time given to us, always short, was at an end; that the One he had talked to, who had made his great camp there by the sea, was old; that he, Boulter, had been questioned closely, as closely as language barriers would permit, on the manner of our arrival in this dim Time, and of our understanding of it; and that the old man—the King, my mind insisted—so near his own end, had been in some way eased, knowing that in our days too his name was known. For his part he had told what his own folk knew, or believed, of the leys. That even then they were old, old beyond reckoning;
that they belonged to the first Time, the first Time of all, when the land of the Pretani heaved itself up out of the sea. And finally that we must go, and go in haste, that we must have no part in what was to befall. To this end, preparations had already been made.

What those preparations might have been, I have no idea; nor do I retain more than the most fleeting recollections of our subsequent journeying. For us, already, the ley-world was breaking, fragmenting, falling apart; and my memory is likewise fragmented, I see hands that gripped reins, bearded faces that split with grins, peytrels and horse-masks that swam glinting in the strange light. Certainly we saw the hills again; and equally certainly we stood, or reined, on a high tor, looked down on a plain of England mapped and lit by the glistening, brilliant lines; all the leys, as far as the eye could reach, awake and burning. This much they had done, all magic, all knowledge summoned to their aid in the last desperate fight. A name was on my lips; I would have spoken it but instantly it seemed the wild flight was resumed, we rushed once more headlong into the pouring blue. I know I gripped the wrist of Sarah, of the dream-creature; I know her hair flew wild, I know I called her name; then again we were falling headlong. I called again, despairingly; and the turf that rose to meet me took my breath. But the next instant Boulter’s hand was on my arm. He shouted urgently,
“Get back, Glyn, quick. Back into the trees …”

I got to my knees; and for a moment I was wholly unable to understand the noise that assailed my ears. A hard, metallic hammering, mixed with deeper crashes like explosions. Flashes lit the bulk of the hill in front of us; by their light I saw a wave of figures come scrambling and slipping down across the chalk. Something too seemed pattering and splashing through the branches over our heads; and my mind at last made the connection, I grabbed the girl’s arm and ran back crouching. Her foot caught in something; she gasped, fell sprawling. I was dragged off balance; and the pattering came again, mixed with another sound. A high, jarring scream, like a needle in the ears,
that passed through the pain threshold and climbed again into supersonics. Boulter shouted something, his voice sharp; I lay stupidly, staring back. Flames were licking up, on the far slope of the down; by their light I saw Coombe Hasset One, just for an instant. Then for the second time that night the impossible seemed to happen. The huge funnel seemed to ripple, shaking from end to end; then it blew up. I watched fragments of dural sail, apparently in slow motion, high into the air; then the tail of the great machine dropped and sagged, I heard rather than saw the storm of shreds that burst from the central section, fled shrieking in every direction. Something roared over our heads; I rolled over stupidly, I think to protect the girl; a stout tree sheared like a straw, I heard the massive top hamper of branches thud back down the slope. The thing sped on, howling; while other roars fled back like echoes, grumbling among the hills as station after station blew. And Boulter hammered the ground, saying over and over with a kind of vicious intensity, “Oh, the clever bastards. Oh, the clever bastards …” I said, or gasped, “What happened?” He swore at that, and banged the grass again. He said, “Shorted a generator. Better than a bomb. Glyn,
get moving
…”

The shouting and firing were closer now, figures beginning to crash into the fringe of trees. We fled back down the slope, still towing the girl. I understood, at least in part. A generator running wild, seizing its geartrain, jamming, or attempting to jam, the huge spinning of the turbine blades above. Coombe Hasset One had exploded like the jet engine it had so much resembled; while in the same instant the massive surge of voltage, lashing forward and back along the chain …

We fell through the kitchen door, the pursuit close behind. Boulter whirled to slam the bolts. He said, “Quick Glyn, the other door. Then get down, and stay there. Where’s Sarah?”

I said, “The lounge, the glass wall. We must have left it down.” He swore again at that. He said, “
Get the silly little bitch out of there
…”

The fire was spreading now, the grass of the
high down blazing fiercely. It lit the lounge with a flickering sunset glow. By it I saw the great pane rising into its frame; and the girl pressed to the wall, seeming mesmerised, her hand still on the control. Beyond, figures were fanning out across the lawn. I ran for her, and it was my turn to snag my foot. I measured my length and Boulter pounded! in after me, a shotgun over his arm. He said, “The bastards aren’t getting in here. Sarah,
get down
.”

I’d got a light cord tangled round my ankle, I couldn’t get it clear. The last of the attackers had reached the fringe of trees. I saw one turn, and I thought he pointed back at the house. A hammering, and the world split into sailing fragments. They lay bright and silent on the carpet, like slivers of firelight. The room seemed suddenly full of smoke.

Boulter was shouting again. The words didn’t immediately register. I said, “The bastards got the window,” and he said, “Get some towels man, cloths, anything.”

I ran for the kitchen. I don’t think I believed, at that point, that what I was seeing was real. I remember thinking, with a kind of urgent idiocy, that if we could only put Time back again, by thirty seconds, it would be enough. But that was ended of course. The leys couldn’t help us now.

I suppose you’ve all seen those Westerns where the wounded heroine goes bravely on with her duties, wearing a fixed smile and a glamorous pink patch. But bullets aren’t like that. Not for real. They smash what they strike, they burst it; bone, sinew, flesh. They spin their victims off their feet, knock them yards; it must be like being hit with a sledgehammer.

Boulter was kneeling on the floor, the girl in his arms. He grabbed for what I brought, bunched and pressed. He said, “We shall need more. Then get her on the settee. We shall want some blankets. For sod’s sake Glyn, be some bloody
use
.” Then he grabbed for the shotgun, quick as a striking snake.

You think you know people, you think you’ve known them for years. But I didn’t really know Alec Boulter. Not till then. He levelled the thing, rock-steady; and there was a moment
when Hebden’s life hung by a thread. He stood beyond the shattered wall, hands at his sides, an automatic slung across his shoulder. A wait, while the flames crackled on the hill; then he spread his hands, a queer little shrug that was almost a gesture of defeat. He said in his thick voice, “This shouldn’t have happened. I’ll get somebody to you.” And he turned away.

I don’t remember all that much about the rest of that night. Or the day that followed. I know for a while I sat by the bridge; the bridge that was just a bridge now, over a pointless, pretty brook. The tall plants shook and nodded; the water burbled while the sun climbed slowly, over the huge sherds scattered on the hill, over Farnham’s Folly, stark now against the burned grass. Later I did what I could to help. There were telegrams to be sent, phone calls to be made, shuttering to be fixed across the smashed glass wall. The blood that had dried on the carpeting seemed curiously unreal; thick brownish patches, any repertory company could have done better. Some ricochet had smashed the TV screen; we swept that mess up as well, repaired a couple of blown fuses, set the room to rights. At least the vhf tuner was intact; over it we heard something of the turmoil into which the country had been thrown. But little of it reached Coombe Hasset, at least for a while. Army teams worked up on the hill, loading fragments of the turbines into massive trucks that one by one trundled away; there were visits from military intelligence and the civil police, routine visits, statements to be made and taken.

Sometime, Boulter talked; about what we had seen and heard when the ley woke up. If indeed it ever woke at all; for it came to me even at the time that the shimmering stream of fire we thought we saw might itself have been part of some queer delusion. A delusion brought on by tiredness, by tension, by the overworked imagination. Though Boulter insisted, and I find it difficult to doubt, that something had been there; something blown away, perhaps for ever, by the explosion at Coombe Hasset One. “Maybe we’ll never know for sure now what
the leys really are,” he said. “Maybe what happened was an accident; some … node formed, something unrepeatable. But we know just a little about what they can do.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Remember Kirlian’s cameras,” he said. “All the vital spots of a man, or a rabbit, or a leaf, shining like stars. They turned out to be acupuncture points as well by the way, did you ever read that?” I shook my head, dully; and he carried on musing aloud. “I think maybe one day,” he said, “there’ll be a Kirlian machine that can look at earth itself. Plot out the nodes, the veins, like an electric map … Then if a field won’t crop, or land goes sour, we just come along with a big golden pin.” He shook his head. “But there’s more to it than that. Remember Low’s ghost theory? About energy never being lost, only changing its state? Maybe when a thing like that gets started everything that lives and dies adds to it, makes it grow. Maybe that’s what Sensitives can tap, what we saw state-changed to a plasma. Then with the voltage surge …” He passed a hand across his eyes. “Don’t tell me I’m crazy, because I haven’t got the energy to argue. But maybe that’s how places get sacred. To all cultures. Our own, the mediaevals, the men who cut the Great God Mai. It would explain what we saw too. Why it was different for each of us. Think of it as a kind of hyper memory bank. You saw the time of Arthur. Because that was what you wanted to see. I saw … well, it doesn’t matter what I saw. Not any more.” He rubbed his face again; and I realized for the first time that he was shockingly, incredibly weary. Far more exhausted than I.

Sarah spent several months in and out of hospital. They saved her arm; though I heard afterwards from Boulter she’ll never regain the full use of her fingers. I visited her, once. I don’t think till then I’d realized the full implication of what Boulter had said, or the real direction of the tragedy. The aura, the thing that had made her vivid, alive, that had lit the very rooms she sat in with a psychic glow, was gone; blown away by the crashing glass, burned out with the breaking of the ley. Some part of her had joined to it, to that immortal Memory; and that had broken too. She was just a pretty, pale girl in a hospital bed, dark-ringed a little under the eyes;
somebody’s secretary, hurt in a Civil War. I walked out, into the noisy traffic of a west country city; and I don’t wish ever to experience the desolation of that moment again.

The remnants of the Big Fans, those fragments that weren’t worth the carting, still lie, or so I’ve heard, where they fell, strewn on the hilltops where the wind still sends its megawatts of energy, night and day. But I doubt they’ll be rebuilt in my lifetime; for Hebden finally had his way, and the Government fell.