Force Majeure

Title Page

FORCE MAJEURE

Daniel O’Mahony

Publisher Information

First published in England in 2007 by

Telos Publishing Ltd

17 Pendre Avenue

Prestatyn

Denbighshire

LL19 9SH

UK

www.telos.co.uk

This digital edition published in 2010

under licence to Andrews UK Ltd

www.andrewsuk.com

Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to:
[email protected]

Force Majeure © 2007 Daniel O’Mahony.

Cover artwork by Gwyn Jeffers

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Quote

‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to my readers, Dave Ball, Simon Bucher-Jones, Emily Carter, Jay Eales, Paul Ebbs, Jonn Elledge, Simon A Forward, Mags L Halliday, the late Craig Hinton, Mark Michalowski, Fiona Moore, John Parkinson, Dale Smith, Nick Wallace and Tat Wood, for their thoughts and comments on various drafts of this book.

About The Author

Daniel O’Mahony
was born in Croydon in 1973 and grew up in Ireland and the South of England.

He has an MA in Media Studies, specialising in the early history of film, and has worked in far too many bookshops.

He has written two
Doctor Who
novels for Virgin Publishing’s New and Missing Adventures ranges of the 1990s:
Falls the Shadow
(1994) and
The Man in the Velvet Mask
(1996), and
The Cabinet of Light
for Telos’ range of original
Doctor Who
novellas.

He also wrote an audio play for Magic Bullet’s
Kaldor City
series (
Storm Mine
), and two plays for Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield range (
Timeless Passages
and
The Tub Full of Cats
).

He lives in Hampshire.

Chapter One:
The Dragons

A minute ago it didn’t exist and all was calm. Thirty seconds ago it came howling down the track, erupting through the fragile surface of the world. Now it’s turned on its back unable to right itself, mewling and helpless.

And 30 seconds from now, it will breathe fire.

Kay scrambles down from her perch in the branches of the tree, taking care not to slip or drop, but less care to keep clean. There’s bark and moss under her fingernails, dirt on her face, and her legs are red with tiny marks like kitten-scratches. She’s an incurable tree-climber, rock-scrambler and hider-in-tight-places. She’s
that
age. Her dress is torn in two places but her parents won’t mind; tonight they’re going to smother her with their fear and their relief.

Now
, it’s still a big adventure. She’s curious about the beast that’s crashed into her secret wilderness. It’s red as sin. It lies panting on the ground by the tree that felled it, a tree now cracked wide open. Kay’s instinct isn’t to help but to watch. She imagines approaching it, touching its skin to find out if it’s still hot. It growls and its wheels whirl, failing to find a purchase on the air. Behind the windshield, its riders are still alive, their fingers scrabbling at the bloodied cracks in the glass. They are no longer in control of their mount.

Kay gazes along the way it came, the still dirt track below knotted branches. The noise of ordinary traffic carries on the air from the distant road, nothing coming close, no more dragons, but the threat is now there. This old, safe, secret hideaway of hers is no longer safe or secret. She reaches the ground and glances down furtively to be sure of her footing. The air brings a rich, giddy smell that she knows from garage forecourts.

When the dragon exhales, she isn’t even looking.

(Even so, her sight will never be good, and later she’ll wonder if her eyes weren’t damaged in some undetectable way by the heat of the explosion. She’ll shake her head – no, that’s
nonsense
.)

The blast lifts her off the ground and slams her into the trunk of the tree, so she gets bruises to take home and a little blood. Then there’s
heat
, a great sea-swell of it washing over her, instant sunburn, but even when it subsides, the air remains hot. The car is burning, the shattered tree is burning, the wind hurls the flames in her direction, and if she were two, three metres closer,
Kay
would be burning. She stumbles back to her feet and her skin is full of splinters. No longer playing, she shakes.

Dry wood snaps underfoot. Kay whips round, casting from side to side, and snares the boy, on the opposite side of the wreck. He has wild hair and a face full of animal terror, as if the explosion has scorched the humanity from him. His eyes are vacant, his mouth half-open showing the edge of his teeth. His clothes are burned away, leaving singed rags drooping from his arms and down his legs, but his skin is healthy and unmarked. He’s no older than Kay but she doesn’t know him.

He drops into a crouch, then pitches himself into the wood, fleeing her, like prey.

He’s new. I’ve never dreamed him before.

Kay lets him run and turns back to the body of the car, which burns as its own funeral pyre. A column of smoke rises into the canopy of the trees and it begins to snow black flakes that sting Kay’s face and singe her dress and smell rusty. She reaches to catch them from the air. As the sirens rise in the distance, she spins herself giddy, and wakes.

And woke.

Mid-wake, she’d imagined she was somewhere familiar. So the room’s odour – a mix of scouring acid and native flowers she couldn’t name – was disconcerting. The lumps of the mattress beneath her back – unique as a fingerprint – felt wrong. She lay on a narrow cot, closer to the floor than she would have liked, and she wasn’t alone.

Something meaty and ancient hung from the ceiling above her head, its considerable length coiled into a spiral. It had a solemn crocodile face, arched horns rising from the back of its skull and a pendulous anchor-tipped tail. Its wings were carefully folded behind its shoulders. It smelled of leather and sulphur and rare steak. With a claw, it plucked her sheet aside, lowered its heavy head and nuzzled her, learning her scent, from her face, from her torso, from her feet. Satisfied, it drew back and returned to being what it was – all it had ever been – a discoloured blotch of red and black dirt on the grimy yellow ceiling.

That ceiling’s low. Don’t bang your head getting up.

Kay climbed out of bed and cracked her head on the low ceiling, adding nothing to her headache. She took stock. Gravel taste in her mouth. Riddled aches in her thighs and back, one hard knot growing beneath her right shoulder-blade. Cold too, because this was a draughty room. She had on the white shorts and striped green T-shirt that – expecting heat – she’d worn for the journey. Her proper nightwear was gone, lost with her cases, perhaps dumped in the bottom of the Atlantic where the deep currents would swell to fill her nightgowns and lingerie and make them dance.

She took stock of her surroundings. A low, narrow room with light shed through slatted panels from the balcony. Birds right outside, cooing and flapping, as if this were London or any other familiar, pigeon-spattered city. Uneven walls decorated with chalk-silhouette men and women. Plain wood doors, one of which promised
bathroom
but whispered
primitive
. No mirrors, anywhere. Rough furniture, seats and benches worn and shaped by use. Two cots, both used, both crumpled, both empty. The must-smell left on the air by abandoned clothes. Her bag on the table (she rummaged for her passports, both safe). Beside it, on a folded cloth, Azure’s insect-head.

It was a tight space, fogged and unhealthy. She went to the balcony. The shutters, stiff and unsteady, opened with a rattle of obscene laughter. There was a snowstorm of feathers as the nesting, feeding, shitting birds fled from their wall-perches into the sky, toward the sun. The day was bright and chilly, and from here she could see across all the city.

Yesterday she’d seen it close-up on the ground. This was different, this was the panorama, the whole
shebang
laid out before her, clean and distant. She preferred it this way. The narrow streets and plazas and canals that had seemed so bewildering were now tamed. It was no longer the lopsided place that had made her lost and sick, the sprawling city clinging to the sharp mountainside. It had been full of too many people yesterday, but now she could just see a few, moving on the rooftops, on the cradle of walkways and aqueducts above the dusty streets, in the parklands and squat brown fields. Arkadin’s Follies stood out from the more placid hives of stone and brick. The strange, purposeless, industrial shapes – spires, cranes, pavilions, mosques, turrets, chimneys and pagodas – rose up and broke themselves on the sky. Some looked metal, half-built then left to rust in the rain. Some looked glass and smashed.

The balcony moaned under Kay’s weight, but it was stapled securely to the wall with Frankenstein bolts. Creeping foliage had wrapped itself around the lattice frame. The air mixed the smell of chlorophyll and cold earth from the flower-boxes, ammonia from the bird-droppings, and rust and powdered stone from the workings of the city. Carelessly, Kay swung her upper body over the railings and peered down – two, three, four storeys’ sheer drop into the canal. Still waters pressed round the base of the building. Further along, a decorated bridge connected it to the city mainland. A pair of nuns – they were women in humourless penguin-suits, so she
assumed
they were nuns – were crossing but didn’t see her. They made gestures with their hands, strange supplications to the door. Children – maybe boys, maybe girls – sat along the towpath with their legs dangling in the water. Kay glanced round for the most familiar landmark.

She jerked back from the edge. She knew where she was. Invisible, all around her, was the old free house.

The tallest building in Candida – taller even than the Follies – was built up on the mountain ridge, hugging it so tightly that it could have been a natural outcrop. Kay was probably no more than a third of the way up. She took another wary look out at the city, realising that the Follies seemed half-finished only because she had no idea what they were intended to be, and that the flatness of the roofs was an illusion imposed by her privileged vantage point. The even, ordered city was a trick of the height. She stepped back inside, pushed the shutters carefully closed and listened for the return of birdsong. It didn’t come. The fresh air had at least cleared the ache from her head. She wasn’t alone. She turned.

Azure was at the door, watching Kay patiently. She seemed a lot smaller without her carapace of pouches and pockets. She was an anorexic matchstick girl carrying a quite enormous bowl in her pocked, spindly arms. The smell, pungent and hot, reached Kay’s stomach, which growled. She was desperately hungry. Had she eaten the day before? She remembered throwing up, she remembered the aftertaste.

Azure smiled, a gappy grin in a small mouth. She brought food and urgency back into Kay’s life.

‘You feeling better?’ she asked.

Kay nodded greedily, then added: ‘Better. Definitely better.’

Azure set the bowl on the table. ‘I got you some breakfast. I didn’t know if you were a veggie, so I played safe. There’ll be meat again at lunch, if that’s your thing. I got you’ – she flashed a smile of triumph – ‘some salmon.’

‘I’m not a veggie,’ Kay said, but the bland boiled scent from the bowl was still irresistible. She sat at the table, took a fork and prodded at the unfamiliar salad of rainbow-coloured greens. Azure sat opposite her, with the grasshopper-head poised between them. She had green hair, run through with other tints that were harder to tell in the gloom, but might be red or golden brown. She looked about 12, but wasn’t. She had no freckles showing and no breasts to speak of under her singlet. Her skin was junkie-yellow pale.

‘Careful now, it’s piping hot,’ she warned.

‘Is this all mine?’ Kay asked. Somehow that seemed important, more important than any other question, and it wasn’t until later that she realised that Azure hadn’t answered. The mock-child leaned forward, resting her chin-point on bridged fingers, resting her elbows on the table. She had big eyes, heavy-lidded. She was an odd insect.

‘I should warn you,’ she said, as Kay began to shovel away her breakfast, ‘the-Lady knows you’re here and wants to see you as soon as you’re ready and fit.’

‘Tell her I won’t be here long. It’s really great of you to put me up, and when I’m settled I’ll make it up to you. I just don’t want to be a bother.’

‘No bother,’ Azure said, still making an innocent smile of her mouth, ‘but the-Lady is insistent.’

‘She’s the owner.’

‘The chatelaine.’ Kay must have blanked. ‘The housekeeper,’ Azure clarified.

‘Are you the owner?’

‘Do I look like an owner?’ Azure swung back in her chair, still smiling. ‘No, no, I’ve not a clue who the owner is. Absentee landlord. Might be the mountain for all I know. Doctor Arkadin, could be. You know him?’

Kay nodded. ‘I’ve heard of him. Obviously.’

Azure tapped the side of her nose and closed in, conspiratorial. ‘I’ve not been lucky enough to meet the man in person.’

Kay frowned. ‘He must have been dead for about 150 years. You’d have to be really lucky to meet him. Or really unlucky.’

‘He’s left his mark. If you want his monument, look around you. He’s more alive today than a lot of people who aren’t dead yet.’

Kay shook her head gently. Azure was fidgety. She leaned forward again, tapped her nose again, her favourite gesture. ‘Between you and me, the-Lady thinks you’ll not be leaving us so soon.’

‘I’ll be moving on. I don’t need to stay here. Seriously. I have contacts.’

‘I hope you do. Me, I take things as they come. Have some fish; it won’t stay hot forever.’

Far above their heads but echoing through the fabric of the house, a bell began to toll. Kay guessed that it was on the roof, and she was right. One day soon she would see it close, standing on the narrow vertigo point with the bellrope wrapped round her arms for safety, while the winds plucked at her fragile tabard and fragile body, while her fingers ached from tugging and each chime deafened and disorientated her. The first time, she would wonder if Azure had obliquely tried to warn her about this over breakfast. She was a messenger and could be privy to all kinds of secrets.

Kay took her first mouthful of salmon, but it was still too hot and burned her mouth.

No two cities were identical. They had their own scents and sounds and architecture, their local colour, but in Kay’s experience, the important features were similar. London and Paris and Dublin and New York were not that different. Anonymous hotel rooms and open-plan offices were the same the world over, and air-conditioning was the great leveller of climate. So, Buenos Aires.

She wondered if she’d been picked for this job because her employers assumed she wouldn’t have any residual antipathy towards Argentina over the forgotten wars of long-ago. It was an idle thought, but she had time for them on the flight. She fantasised calmly and pointlessly about hijackers, pollution, the Mile High Club and the possibility of the engine dropping off the wing in mid-air. She watched several movies. Bollywood was big that year. She worried about the pilot, that anonymous stranger who was taking her for a ride. She didn’t sleep. She believed she could conquer jetlag. She stumbled from the airport concourse to her hotel, head full of hazy thoughts, without noticing the change. Her contact at the Argentine office met her there. An Englishman, he was younger than her, senior to her, shorter than her. He had a crushing handshake. He was more attractive, more charming, than Her Better Half back in England. He joked nervously about suicide, like so many in their profession. He wanted to screw her, she realised even in her befuddled state, not because he liked her but as an essential part of the deal, establishing seniority and marking territory. Unfussily, she rebuffed him. She changed, ate, tried to stay awake. She met her contact again for dinner, and this time he brought the file.