Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (41 page)

The nymphomaniac, a gaunt and physically strong woman who looked about twice her actual age, was given a bottle of whisky and the promise of solid food for every successful completion of the sexual act that she could achieve with Professor Francis Watkins. The two of them were locked in a cellar for a day and a night – at the end of which time Professor Francis Watkins was hysterical and the woman had earned a credit of three meals. The degradation was witnessed by a senior Brother, who kept a long but somewhat entertaining vigil for the purpose.

This, however, was only the first part of the initiation. The Brothers had
noted that, above all, Professor Francis Watkins wished to preserve his books. So they made him burn them. It was the only occasion on which he attempted to display courage. He refused to light the bonfire and told them that they could kill him first.

The Brothers of Iniquity had no intention of killing him. They merely offered him the choice of burning the books or spending an unspecified time locked up with the nymphomaniac. He decided to burn his books. Anything seemed preferable to the kind of rape that had not, to the best of his knowledge, been documented or even suggested in the books he was about to destroy.

It was only afterwards, when his spirit was broken, that he realised there were compensations in belonging to the Brothers of Iniquity. The Order, though not unique in history, was certainly unique in modern times. It embodied a form of mania that was in itself fascinating. For the Brothers of Iniquity were dedicated to the propositions that God was mad, cruel and utterly absurd.

God, they believed (or, at least, the fanatics among them believed), had brought about Omega radiation and the Radiant Suicide simply because man was in danger of developing a rational, healthy and flourishing society. Further, they believed that God had purposely left the process of destruction incomplete because he wished to offer redemption to the chosen. The chosen were, of course, the Brothers of Iniquity. It was their mission to complete God’s work among the lesser mortals; and when they had completed the task of cleansing the planet they would then be able to enjoy the ultimate privilege of destroying themselves. At which point, according to their theologians, they were destined for immortal madness in some indescribably psychotic heaven until God should choose to have more interesting nightmares and clothe them with substance in some far and infinitely absurd anti-Eden.

The surprising thing was not that transnormals should develop such ideas but that so many transnormals should be capable of organising themselves so effectively; for the Brothers of Iniquity were numbered now in hundreds. Their mortality rate was high; but so was their rate of recruitment. And their leader, who called himself Brother Lucifer, had the kind of demagogic quality that earlier tyrants might have envied.

Adopting the proposition that life, being God-given, was absurd, he sought to magnify its absurdity by pursuing absolute frustration along a path of random acts. He permitted the Order to indulge in ritual cannibalism because of its absurdity; but death by torture was the fate of anyone who dared to eat pork because he decreed that pigs, being almost perfectly absurd, were therefore sublime and possibly the purest manifestation of God’s will. On one occasion he had even sacrificed about a hundred of the brethren in a forlorn attempt to save half a dozen pigs from a very large pack of dogs.

After a time, and humiliated though he was by the constant indignities.
heaped upon him in accordance with the precept of absolute frustration, Professor Watkins began almost to enjoy his experiences in a masochistic sort of way. He was in a unique position for field-work, he felt. He had still not abandoned hope that sooner or later the nightmare would end and that somehow he would once again find his way into a world of academic peace and security; but meanwhile he, the trained observer, would record the basic, naked manifestations of human madness and depravity. Some day he would be able to write about it. Some day he would be able to evaluate what had happened and perhaps use his knowledge to do what no one else had ever been able to do before – to evaluate, by negative reference, the basic criteria of sanity.

But then he was overtaken by the random consequences of Iniquitism. The Brothers, lost in a fog, discovered Ambergreave and decided to sanctify it by their attentions. It was the first time Professor Francis Watkins had seen the philosophy of the Brothers of Iniquity put into practice on a large scale. He was terrified by what he saw. He was also badly bitten; and, in a state of moral and physical collapse, had hidden himself in the windmill, hoping that the Brothers would go away and leave him. But one of them found him before the company departed. When he would not move, and because he seemed to be wounded, he was shot twice for good measure and left to die in his own time.

This was the story he told Greville and Liz, while taking grateful sips of water and easing himself into a comfortable position. Greville had thought that nothing could surprise him anymore. He was wrong. Professor Francis Watkins could and did surprise him. Give or take a little, thought Greville, there but for the grace of sheer chance go most of us.

‘I would add,’ said Professor Francis Watkins, smiling wanly, ‘that despite the care of your good lady, my own stupid constitution and your commendable patience, I would be much obliged if you would discharge that instrument of destruction in such a way as to provide me with the minimum of pain and a fairly rapid demise … I – I rather fear I have seen a little too much.’

‘Where are the Brothers of Iniquity now?’ asked Greville.

The old man shrugged. ‘Who knows. They went to the south – that is, I believe, towards Thetford – but sheer whim could take them anywhere.’ He shuddered. ‘It could even bring them back here … Now, if you would be so kind as to aim carefully and press the trigger … I really think I would be much obliged, you know.’

If he had pleaded for life, Greville would probably have shot him. But he was pleading for death and, perhaps affected by a philosophy of absurdity himself, Greville refused to grant the final luxury.

He save Liz an inquiring look. She nodded.

‘We’re taking you home,’ said Greville. He laughed grimly. ‘After all, we have our own standards of iniquity to consider.’

Professor Francis Watkins started crying again.

Francis – for so they came to call him – took quite a long time to recover from his wounds. Being an oldish man, unused to exertion or privation, he did not have much stamina. Nor did he have any will to live. Because of this, and out of sheer perversity, Greville determined that he should live. What was to be done with an ex-professor of psychology, Greville did not know; nor did he care to look very much into the future, for he had a presentiment that, somehow, time was running out.

The trouble was that he, who had managed alone and had been aloof for so long, had allowed himself to become emotionally involved with mankind once more in the person of Liz. He loved her as he had never loved Pauline. He loved her enough to be more afraid for her than for himself. They had got over the stage of wanting to take from each other and had learned to give to each other. It was a delicious, agonising, heady sort of feeling. It was a mad honeymoon in a nightmare world. Above all, it was a relationship that was utterly vulnerable … And now there was Francis … And suddenly the cottage on the island that was big enough for two was overcrowded. The citadel had become an open city. The hard world of reality, disguised as an old man with bullet wounds and dog bites, had entered by insane invitation through the back door.

They had carried Francis from the windmill to the edge of the lake in a wheelbarrow. They had ferried him across to the island, taken him into the cottage and dumped him on the bed that had so recently been a bed of love. That, thought Greville, as he levered the old man on to sheets that still bore the imprint and even the warmth of recent love and tenderness, was symbolically the end of the honeymoon. There would, with luck, be other times; but they would never again be like the times that had gone.

It was still daylight, though the sun was already sinking through a quiet sky. Greville told Liz that he was going to go back to Ambergreave and explore a bit more systematically.

‘But what if those bloody maniacs come back?’ protested Liz.

‘That’s one of the things I want to find out,’ said Greville. ‘My guess is that the fog saved us last night. If they’d known there was an island in the lake, an island with a house on it, very likely they’d have had a go. According to our friend, they have pushed off towards Thetford. He may be right, but it would be damn stupid not to check on it. I’ll take the car and drive a little way
along the Thetford road. I just want to make sure they aren’t going to double back.’

‘You’ll be careful?’

‘Of course, I’ll be careful. What the hell! Do you think I want to get myself hammered?’ Greville’s irritability served to disguise his anxiety.

‘I don’t know,’ retorted Liz. ‘Transies do stupid things, don’t they?’

Greville held her to him for a moment, then went out of the cottage. Life, he thought, was a crazy affair. You could spend years teaching yourself not to care about any damn thing in the world. You could witness suicide, murder, mayhem, starvation, disease and massacre and remain reasonably detached. Then suddenly you were flung head first into a mud-bath of emotion. You struggled in it, you wallowed in it and finally you ended up drowning in it – and caring like hell about every god damned inconsequential tragedy in an inconsequential world.

He rowed ashore, checked his guns and started the car. Then he drove slowly through Ambergreave, gazing at the horror and desolation that surrounded him in the now fading light, and feeling like a lone survivor in a world irrevocably committed to putrefaction and death.

It was some time since he had felt so lonely. The day was still quite warm, but it was some time since he had felt so cold. The sails of the windmill were still rotating slowly, and what was left of Miss Worrall was rotating with them. Suddenly he could not bear the sight. He stopped the car and got out.

After a few minutes of searching, he discovered Miss Worrall’s carefully hoarded store of paraffin. She had about thirty gallons left. He poured three-quarters of it on the ground floor of the mill and took the rest outside to splash on the sails as they came round. Then he used one of his precious matches to light the funeral pyre. It blazed up quickly and the sails began to burn like some monstrous Catherine wheel, flinging off sparks and bits of timber. The stone shell of the windmill acted like a chimney and drew the fire inside until the roaring and the heat made Greville stand well back.

Setting fire to the mill was a fool thing to do, he decided. But he felt better for having done it. He waited until the sails came crashing down, bringing what was left of Miss Worrall to be incinerated in their midst, then he started the car once more and drove cautiously along the Thetford road.

He drove about five miles and discovered only two wounded Brothers of Iniquity resting by the roadside. Doubtless they were hoping to overtake the main body by nightfall.

Neither of them had weapons and, in fact, it would probably not have made a great deal of difference if they had. They were both weakened by pain and loss of blood. They were lying on a thick patch of grass round a bend, and Greville was already driving past before he noticed them. He stopped the
car about fifty yards further on, and hurled himself out on the theory that he might have walked into an ambush.

He waited, but nothing happened. Then he picked himself up and, shot-gun in hand, walked back towards the two men. They saw him coming. One of them tried to crawl away, but the other was too weak or too stiff to move.

Greville felt inclined to indulge himself in melodrama. He stopped about five yards from them. The man who was trying to crawl gave up the attempt and turned to face him.

‘Stand up,’ said Greville.

They both tried, but neither of them could make it.

‘The sentence of this court,’ said Greville, ‘is that you shall have a little time for reflection.’

He shot each of them at close range in the stomach. Then, unmoved by the resulting screams, he turned the car round and drove slowly back in the direction of Ambergreave.

Each day for a few days after the massacre at Ambergreave Greville made probing sorties in different directions – chosen more or less at random. On two occasions he discovered small villages through which the Brothers had obviously and recently passed, leaving behind them a swathe of destruction similar to the one they had left at Ambergreave; but he did not encounter any more of them alive. They seemed to be heading generally south, perhaps making for London. Greville rather hoped that this was the case, because he felt that in London or its environs they stood a reasonable chance of encountering opposition that would prove too big for them to handle. The worst fate he could wish upon them was not that they should encounter a larger and better armed group of humans but simply that they should receive the attention of a horde of rats – preferably very hungry rats, and preferably at night.

Meanwhile, despite his age and lack of stamina, Francis continued to improve. Among his treasures in the cellar, Greville had a large store of exceedingly old and quite useless penicillin tablets. These he fed to Francis like sweets, and the old man developed a liking for them since they had the vestiges of a synthetic orange flavour. They didn’t appear to do him any harm and just possibly may have done him a little good.

Greville allowed Francis to continue to occupy the bed in which he and Liz had created their private world of ecstasy. The bedroom became Francis’s private territory. Greville had found a massive four-poster in one of the derelict houses of Ambergreave. Section by section he hauled it down to the lake and floated it across to the island. Further scrounging provided him with a foam rubber mattress.

The four-poster was magnificent, hand-carved and obviously very ancient. When it was assembled in the living room Liz was so delighted with it that she made a canopy and curtains for it. The bed completely dominated the room, and in the evenings when Francis had tactfully retired to his own territory, Liz and Greville, feeling mildly sinful, would build up a large fire and retire to bed content simply to talk and look at the flames. Then, after a time, Greville would draw the curtains and effectively reduce the cosmos to a cube enclosing one man and one woman.