Blood Crazy (32 page)

‘This place.' I looked round the room. ‘Does Adam know anything about it?'

‘Do you mean, is he aware of the conspiracy?'

‘Conspiracy?'

‘Yes, he's in on it. And so are you. Come on, sit down, Nick. Once I've told you a few things it'll all become as clear as that window why I've done the things I've done.'

‘Like the ages of your people here in the community? I mean it seems odd that apart from you, Adam, Timothy and the two Chinese girls, everyone else seems to be under the age of eleven.'

She nodded. ‘There is a reason. When I created the community I deliberately chose young children with minds I could mould. Clearly Timothy is a special case. The Chinese twins are from a Christian mission school and are devoutly religious.'

‘Like Adam?'

‘Yes, he was. He'd planned on becoming a monk.'

‘You say he
was
religious.'

‘After the collapse of society in April he went off the rails. He'd either spend hours cursing God or going round every church in the district and burning it down. At that time our group lived in one hotel. It got to the point where I had to lock him in his room. He even tried to kill himself.'

‘Someone worked a miracle on him. To look at his drive and stamina now you'd think he's on a mission from God.'

‘In a way he is.'

‘So he's returned to the flock, then?'

‘No. Not in that sense. But he has a faith.'

‘Are you being deliberately mysterious or am I thick as pig shit?'

Bernadette laughed. ‘I'm sorry, I've kept you in the dark long enough. Now … Do you believe in God?'

‘No.'

I thought then she would try and sell religion to me like some doorstep Jehovah's Witness. Instead she sighed with relief and said, ‘Good. If you were religious I'd have to give you the edited version of events to spare your feelings. Religious people might find what I'm going to tell you too controversial, and too disturbing.'

I leaned forward. ‘You've got my interest now. Keep talking.'

‘Here it is then, Mr Aten. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My next question to you is: do you believe that there is a force which is invisible and beyond your control, but a force that has the power to affect, even control your life?'

‘No. Not at all.'

‘Ever fallen in love?'

‘Yes, but …' The bit that should have followed ‘but' wouldn't come. I remembered getting the hots for such and such a girl and making up excuses to myself to pass her house twenty times a day in the hope of bumping into her or even catching sight of her. I didn't want to do it. That damned thing called infatuation forced me.

Bernadette smiled, knowing she'd got me on that one. ‘A few more examples of this power that can affect our lives. We're young enough to remember what it's like to be adolescent. Along with the spots come loads of strange feelings and desires. Things you wouldn't dream of doing at eleven obsess you when you're fourteen. You spend hours staring at the mirror worrying about the shape of your nose, you listen to sad songs late at night and you feel like you're from another planet, and that people no longer understand you.'

‘Yeah, that happens to everyone.'

‘Agreed. And then there are things that happen to people individually. You've heard of the empty nest syndrome? This affects women when their children grow up and leave home. They go through a period of feeling useless and ready for the scrap heap. Then there are people who can never shake off a penetrating sense of loneliness even when they're in a crowd. Some feel life is pointless, or that something vital is missing from their lives. They might be wealthy people with families, but they can't shake off this feeling that there's a hole in their lives which, however hard they try, they can't fill – sometimes it drives them to drink or drugs.'

‘Okay,' I said, ‘some men and women feel as if there
is
a force
that controls their lives. But it's just one of those things that affect certain individuals. Like some people get depressed for no real reason.'

‘No, Nick. This force I'm talking about affects all people to a lesser or greater degree. All people. Me, you, the Pope, the President of the United States. For example, have you ever been frightened by a dream, amused by a dream or even had a dream that makes you sexually aroused?'

She smiled when I blushed.

She continued, getting into the rhythm now. ‘Why are people interested by apparently illogical pastimes like football, tennis, horse racing, music, dance, stamp collecting, watching TV and a million other things?' She took a breath. ‘Right, imagine this. There's a hall with a hundred people sitting in it. You get up on the stage, Nick. You're going to make a speech. How do you feel?'

‘Nervous.' I grinned. ‘Very, very nervous. Trembling legs, butterflies in stomach, dry mouth. Probably start stammering.'

‘Me too. Why? Why do all these physical symptoms torment us when we stand up to make a speech, or sit an exam, or go on our first date?'

I shrugged. ‘Human nature.'

‘Yes, human nature. And it is natural that our behaviour is affected by a force we do not control, cannot see, or even fully understand.' She opened a beer and poured it, noisily, into a glass. ‘If I did this in front of twenty people – the sound of running liquid. What do you think'd happen?'

‘Some of them would want to go to the toilet.'

‘So, running liquid instils in all people, if they have a full bladder, the urge to urinate. Why?'

‘You're the one with the answers, Bernadette.'

‘Did you know that for tens of thousands of years in prehistoric times man was nomadic? We roamed in small tribes, never settling anywhere longer than a few weeks, carrying everything we owned including our babies. We were on the trail of the mammoth that migrated with the ice cap. Following us were all kinds of predators, wolves, bears, big cats.'

‘So what's this got to do with wanting to piss when you hear running water?'

‘Stands to reason, doesn't it? Think of the danger you're in if people in your tribe are stopping every five minutes to urinate. It might make the difference between catching that mammoth you're hunting or starving – or maybe the wolves will catch up with you. Far better if the tribe synchronises its toilet habits. And that's what happened. If one person urinates the sound of water hitting the ground makes everyone else want to urinate too. So they all empty their bladders at more or less the same time then they can carry on walking without interruptions for another few hours.'

I nodded. What she told me was sinking in.

She smiled. ‘I just wanted to establish that you accept that there
is
a force beyond us that can have some degree of control over our lives. Now, I've been working hard all morning so I'll let you make me a coffee before we crack on with the next revelation.'

As I poured coffee I said, ‘Now something tells me you're going to peddle me this Freudian psychological shit.'

‘I agree. Sigmund Freud, the man who made the first significant discoveries about the human mind, believed everyone had hang-ups about sex. In a nutshell, he was more screwed-up than his patients. You can safely ignore eighty percent of Freud's work. In fact, most psychologists screwed up. They portrayed human beings as crummy animals made up of a rag-bag of psychological mechanisms. You got the feeling psychologists' studies of the human mind were on the level of a zoologist dissecting buffalo shit.'

‘I suppose something like that pissed me off about religious education lessons. Basically all we were taught was that men and women were evil, or weak, or jam full of sin.'

She grinned. ‘Good point. I think we're on the same wavelength. Human beings are the most brilliant stars in creation. We're the highest developed. We're capable of working miracles. Sure, there are a few bad apples but that shouldn't rot the whole barrelful.'

‘Hang on, Bernadette. You sit here and tell me this. Then you go through there into the Ark and you're singing hymns and telling those kids how wonderful God is. That makes as much sense as an open-ended condom.'

‘Bear with me, Nick. As I said, by the time we're finished everything will make sense. Religions do have their uses. Problems arise when they get confused, or twisted by tyrants who realize they
can use religion to control the population. Or more commonly religions simply get past their sell-by date: that happened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.'

‘So we should ditch religion and make the world a better place.'

‘That, Nick, would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater … An example of a religion that benefited all its members was Gnosticism which flourished around fifteen hundred years ago. Most religions say this: Suffer on earth because you get your reward in heaven when you join God. Stuff that, said the Gnostics, we believe we can join God on Earth and have the happiness we're entitled to while we're alive. They believed they achieved this.'

‘Cheeky. I bet the Gnostics upset some powerful people, didn't they?'

‘They did. The established church of the time were so frightened of the Gnostics they tried to stamp them out. They spread all kinds of foolish propaganda about Gnostics being devil worshippers. They weren't, of course. What the Gnostics had done was develop a religious faith that resulted in its members leading happy and contented lives free from hypocrisy and fear. No, Nick, I'm not trying to peddle you Gnosticism, either. Just that some people were successful in developing meaningful faiths that gave them, here on Earth, while they were alive, peace, satisfaction and prosperity. And just to give you a clue where I'm taking you with all this, here's a saying of the Gnostics: Man is a mortal god. And God is an immortal man.'

I struggled to work all this through the gut of my brain. Bernadette was trying to make this explanation easy for me. But I'm no intellectual. Sure, I spent a lot of time in the school library – chatting up girls or having a sly smoke behind the encyclopaedias. The only book I ever took from a shelf was
The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare
. I belted Tug Slatter round the back of the head with it.

‘Man is a mortal God. God is an immortal man …' I said half to myself. ‘Does that mean that we're—'

‘Shit,' hissed Bernadette and jumped to her feet. ‘Problems.' She ran to the radio transmitter in the corner. She had left it on low, monitoring the worldwide conversations while she talked to me.

‘What's wrong?'

‘It's the colony outside Berlin,' she said cranking up the volume. ‘They're under attack.'

‘Adults?'

‘Yep. They've been expecting it for some time. They reckon there's more than five thousand of them massing on the banks.' Quickly she explained, ‘There's a colony of a hundred kids living on an island in a river. There were some scrappy attacks before from adults using boats, but the colony is well armed and nothing came of it. Now the adults are trying something different. They're … sorry, Erich's talking again.'

We listened. I don't understand German but it was the emotion carried by the voice that set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. It wasn't just fear – I could almost reach out and touch the sheer astonishment, almost a sense of wonder.

‘Shit, shit, shit,' hissed Bernadette. ‘This isn't good … Nick, you told me how the Creosotes were studying us, and that they now planned their attacks? Well, their ability to solve problems is coming on in leaps and bounds. From what Erich is saying it appears the Creosotes are forming a human bridge to the island. It's the middle of winter; the water must be near freezing but hundreds are standing in the water.'

She listened to the transmission, staring with glistening eyes at the map covered with thumbtacks. She must have been imagining what it was like there on the river island.

The tone of Erich's voice frightened me more than I could have admitted to anyone.

As I stared out of the window at the snow-choked mountains, I found myself willing some part of me to fly to Eskdale to see what was happening. All I could see in my mind's eye were the Creosote swamping the hotel like a dirty great ocean. Sarah, fighting like Sheila had done, to the last, to save her sisters and the babies.

Erich's broadcast went on for hours. I slipped into a kind of trance, only conscious of cold, a kind of supernatural cold that bore through me.

At six p.m. Bernadette sighed heavily, stood up, pulled a red thumbtack from the world map – and replaced it with one that was black.

8 p.m.

You remember those tigers in their cages at the zoo? Pacing backwards, forwards. Up onto the rock. Down to the water bowl. Pacing again.

I was like that. The death of the German kids had twisted my gut. Now I did want to swim for the shore and run across the mountains back to Eskdale. Sure it would be suicide but I felt I had to act. I had to move physically with a sense of purpose. Even running like a crazy man through the snow would be better than being caged on this clump of barges they called the frigging Ark.

‘Nick … Sit down. Unwind a little.'

‘I can't. I keep thinking what if what happened to the Germans happens to Eskdale. You know they've got two sadistic thugs in charge there that couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery? If even fifty Creosotes attack they've got no chance. They're babies and little children there. With no one to protect them.'

‘And you can save them, Nick?'

‘Yes.'

I stopped pacing. The belief I could save them struck me like lightning. Before I was just too plain scared to accept responsibility. Me, boss? No way! Somewhere along this shitty route from Doncaster
to the lady of the lake I'd lost the old Nick Aten and grown a new one.