Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (40 page)

Neither Big Willie nor his mother was an insupportable loss to the community. But Miss Worrall came under the heading of key personnel. Without her services as a grinder of corn it would be virtually impossible to make bread. Besides, Greville rather liked her. She seemed to him the kind of transie who was almost eccentrically normal.

The mill was on the far side of the village. Liz and Greville had to go down the entire length of the main street to get to it. They passed more corpses, including that of Charles Cuthbert the blacksmith, and three more pseudo-monks. Cuthbert had evidently had his throat cut. The ‘monks’ appeared to have died variously of gun-shot wounds and dogs.

But the windmill itself was the scene of greatest devastation. It also presented the remains of what must have been quite a battle. Miss Worrall’s Alsatians – Greville counted five of their bodies – had done phenomenal service, for they appeared to have accounted for at least twice their number of ‘monks’.

The Alsatians had died of gun-shot wounds, knife wounds and sheer bludgeoning. The ‘monks’ had died mostly of throat and facial wounds. In death, dogs and men seemed to be mingling almost affectionately – as if each
was now regretting the excesses to which they had been driven by fear, blood-lust, pain and plain savagery.

The tower of the mill was of solid stone which Miss Worrall had covered with pitch a long time ago. The ‘monks’ – at least, the survivors – evidently found such a permanent surface irresistible: they had painted more choice slogans upon it.

Only God washes whiter than white
…
Heaven has fewer vacancies
… and, with final simplicity,
Transies go home
…

Neither Greville nor Liz paid much attention to the slogans, however. Their eyes were drawn to the windmill sails, now slowly and creakingly rotating in a barely perceptible breeze.

The sails had been used as a makeshift cross. Where they joined the hub and the hub joined the main spindle in the windmill cap, Miss Worrall hung. She had been crucified in the traditional manner.

Liz tried to be sick – but nothing would come. Greville wanted to find something – anything – and smash it to pieces.

It was fortunate he had his shotgun ready, for as they gazed at the appalling sight he heard a low growl. A surviving Alsatian, dripping blood, seemed to drag itself in slow motion from inside the windmill. It summoned up its strength for a last onslaught – doubtless so crazed by pain it no longer knew or cared who was friend and who was enemy. It was as well that the Alsatian’s reactions had been slowed down, for so had Greville’s. He only just managed to shoot it in mid-air. The close range blast from the twelve-bore almost tore the dog in two. It was dead before it touched the ground.

Liz stopped trying to be sick and began to cry.

‘Shut up!’ said Greville. ‘Save it till later. This isn’t the bloody time for luxuries.’

Liz looked at him and shut up. As she did so, both of them became aware of another sound. It was like a long low animal moan that subsided in a fit of coughing. It seemed to come from inside the windmill. There was silence for a moment or two. Then it came again. This time it sounded human.

‘There’s one of the bastards left,’ cried Greville exultantly. ‘Maybe we can trade an eye for an eye.’

Throwing caution aside, he ran to the open windmill door and scrambled up the wooden steps. Fearfully, Liz followed him.

There was nothing on the ground floor – nothing but a couple of sacks of corn, half a sack of flour and Miss Worrall’s old piano. Greville ran upstairs to the second storey – Miss Worrall’s bedroom and the sleeping quarters of her two favourite dogs. There was nothing there either.

The third storey was the grinding room. It contained the millstones, a pile of empty sacks – and the source of the noise that Liz and Greville had heard.
One of the ‘monks’ lay on the pile of sacks. There was blood on his face and – symbolically enough – blood on his hands.

Greville felt a sudden surge of satisfaction. Here, at least, was something that could be made to suffer for all that other suffering.

He raised his shotgun. The man on the pile of sacks smiled faintly.

‘Vengeance may prove somewhat inadequate,’ he said apologetically. ‘I rather think I’m already dying.’

Greville was surprised as much by the voice as by its owner. He was no less surprised by the words.

‘Maybe we can persuade you to put off that happy event for a little longer,’ snapped Greville. ‘Now who the hell are you and what were all the fun and games in aid of? And talk quickly and sensibly or I shall have the pleasure of blowing your hands and feet off one by one.’

The man on the sacks did not appear to be greatly perturbed by the threat.

‘I’d like some water,’ he said. ‘I’d never have believed I could feel so damned dry.’

Greville turned to Liz who was standing behind him. ‘Get him some water. There’s a pump just outside.’

She went back down the stairs and returned a few moments later with an earthenware jug. The man on the sacks licked his lips.

Greville took the jug and went close to him. ‘Now, let’s talk.’

‘The water first, please.’

Greville poured some of the water on the floor at his feet.

‘I said: Let’s talk.’

The wounded man half-stifled a moan. ‘Much good may it do you,’ he said weakly. ‘But as a point of what once might literally have been academic interest, you are being uncharitable to one Professor Francis Watkins, sometime holder of the chair of psychology at the late and not entirely lamented University of East Anglia … Oh God! For Christ’s sake kill me.’ The last words rose into a scream, and the scream brought a fresh trickle of blood from his lips.

Sadistically, Greville poured more water at the feet of Professor Francis Watkins. ‘Now tell us all about your religious persuasion,’ he said pleasantly. ‘If it sounds interesting, we might even give you a drink of water. If you can convince us that it’s rather jolly to chop people up and crucify them, we might even be kind enough to finish you off. But don’t bore us. We don’t like to be bored.’

Despite his ghastly appearance, and despite the pain, the man on the sacks managed to smile. ‘Anything is a fair trade for water,’ he murmured. ‘Sir, you are addressing a conscript lay member of the quite extraordinary order of the Brothers of Iniquity. I was starving and they fed me. I was useful and they let me live … The great joke is that I once had the effrontery to consider myself
an authority on abnormal psychology.’ He began to laugh, but the laughter died into a thin, bubbly scream.

Suddenly Liz took the jug out of Greville’s hand. She bent down, and cradled Professor Francis Watkins in her arms like an overgrown child. Then she gave him some water.

‘Thank you, my dear. It hurts, you know. It hurts even to discover that there is compassion left in England today.’

Despite his optimism – and in the circumstances it must have been justifiably described as such – Professor Francis Watkins, authority on abnormal psychology and temporary Brother of Iniquity, was not mortally wounded. A bullet had passed through his shoulder, another had ploughed through the top of his leg, and his arms and hands had been bitten by dogs. But with reasonable care, he would live.

That much Liz discovered when, regardless of Greville’s obvious disgust, she ripped away the ‘monk’s’ habit and began to clean up the wounds as well as she could. The blood coming from Professor Francis Watkins’s mouth was simply due to the fact that he had bitten his tongue rather badly when the wounds were still fresh and giving him quite a lot of pain.

Greville resented the man on the pile of sacks. He resented him because his own blood-lust was dying, because, caught between pity and hatred and revulsion, he was no longer sure of himself. Professor Francis Watkins was not a young man. He was fat and sixtyish and pathetic. He was the kind of transie to whom things were destined to happen simply because he completely lacked the art of avoiding anything. As some people are accident prone, this man was disaster prone. That, thought Greville, you could tell at a glance. If anything terrible was going to occur, he was the kind of man who would be naturally drawn to it as to a magnet.

The water revived him a little, and so did Liz with her inexpert ministrations. While she cleaned him up the tears streamed down his face in gratitude; and when he had got over the crying he began to pour out his story – regardless of the pain it caused his tongue – in a spontaneous act of confession.

While civilisation was collapsing upon itself, Professor Francis Watkins, whose own psychology turned out to be more abnormal than he had formerly supposed, retired to his library with stocks of food as large as he could muster, prepared to sit out what he had first regarded as only a temporary and rather interesting return to the Dark Ages.

But the Dark Ages got darker instead of lighter, the food store dwindled slowly away; and in the end he was forced to go out and risk his life – and, more important, the future of his library – for such delicacies as potatoes, turnips and, in the end, even carrion. He was no cook, but he had discovered that you could eat practically anything if you boiled it long enough.

The trouble was he was not much good at finding food. Sooner or later he
would have to quit his beloved library or die in it of starvation. He could not drive a car, he could not fight and he could only just manage to pull the trigger of a gun. The wonder was that he had managed to survive it all.

Finally, when he had gone two days without food, an idea came to him. Civilisation had collapsed, but surely small centres of culture and learning must be flourishing somewhere? He just could not imagine a world in which all that he regarded of value had disappeared.

Granting, then, the existence of intelligent groups of people more fortunate than himself – people, doubtless whose primary concern would be the preservation of all that was worthwhile (to him, this only meant books) until the return of sane social organisation – it merely remained for him to find one of these groups, attach himself to it and wait patiently until the world was ready to appreciate the significance of Freud and Jung, of Adler and Pavlov, of Yevtushenko and Eysenck once more.

That was the theory. It seemed a good theory. There was only one problem. Professor Francis Watkins had acquired one of the best private libraries on psychology in the whole of England. He did not want to abandon it. Indeed, it was his duty not to abandon it. Therefore he could either remain with it and die or take the best books with him. Unfortunately he had no means of transport.

But he was nothing if not a resourceful man. Hunger had sharpened his wits. He could not drive a car, but he could certainly push a small cart. If he could find a cart.

He couldn’t. However, he found a substitute – or to be strictly accurate, he found three substitutes. They were perambulators that he discovered in a derelict baby-wear shop. They were the only forms of transport that he could lay his hands on.

So he filled them full of books. The choice was heartbreaking. Even loaded to overflowing, the perambulators could only carry about twenty per cent of the books that he considered essential for the foundation of a decent library in psychology.

And having filled the perambulators with his best books – the task of selection alone took him the best part of three days – he set off into the bright blue yonder. He didn’t know where to go, but he felt that if he journeyed long enough in almost any direction sooner or later he would find sanctuary.

His method of progress was simple. He would push the first perambulator about a hundred yards, then he would come back for the second, and then for the third. Assuming that he could get enough food to keep body and soul together, he calculated that he would be able to cover five miles a day. At that rate, he told himself, it ought not to take longer than a month before he came across people who were similarly dedicated to keeping the intellectual achievements of the world alive.

There were only two flaws in the grand design. He didn’t really know where he was going; and even if he did, he certainly couldn’t find enough food to sustain him while he was getting there.

On the strength provided by about six pounds of very old potatoes and the rancid remains of a two-pound tin of butter, he wandered about for eight or nine days, meticulously pushing the first perambulator, going back for the second and then for the third. It was a miracle that be avoided being eaten by dogs or rats. And perhaps in doing so he had used up his entire ration of miracles.

For, having consumed the last of his potatoes and the last of his butter, he suddenly realised that he was not going anywhere at all, and lay down to die. It was then that the Brothers of Iniquity found him.

If he had been more than half alive, they would have killed him. As he was obviously more than half dead, they did their best to save him. Their best consisted simply of giving him food and keeping him warm. For a day or two he raved, believing that, surrounded as he was by tonsured heads and robes of Hessian and even sack-cloth, he had truly arrived back in the Dark Ages. But then he grew lucid and began to get better.

So the Brothers of Iniquity shaved his head, provided him with a monk’s habit and initiated him as a compulsory novice. The initiation rites of the Brothers of Iniquity were simple and exceedingly effective; the novice was forced to do what he most disliked doing. Men who were physical cowards were forced to fight against veterans of the Order with knives, razors or bottles. Men who were naturally courageous were made to endure all kinds of indignities without the means of retaliation. Men who were normally sexed were handed over to a group of homosexuals. Men who could not swim were thrown into a river. Men who could not bear to be alone were given a period of solitary confinement. And so on. Every man had his Achilles’ heel, and every man was subject to public exposure and degradation.

Professor Francis Watkins was not greatly interested in women, so the Brothers of Iniquity produced for him a half-starved nymphomaniac whom they had acquired in their travels and neglected to rape or kill only because she would have welcomed both or either.