Night plague, p.29
Night Plague, page 29
“All right, then,” said Kasyx at last, “let’s take a look at this lady.”
They descended the wet chalky slope. Mol Besa noticed that Zasta stayed close to him, and thought to himself: He might be a Night Warrior, but he’s still my son. He turned around and saw that Effis was close behind him, too. Maybe he could still give people strength; maybe he could still give them guidance. The Night Plague hadn’t yet overwhelmed him altogether.
They had almost reached the tunnel entrance when a heavily-built misshapen man appeared. He wore a builder’s donkey jacket and chalk-filthy overalls, and he walked with a swiveling limp. He stood in front of them, leaning to one side, barring their way. His eyes were small and colorless and piggish, and the waxy skin of his face seemed to ripple and shift.
“’Ere, you’re trespassing,” he told them. His voice was a treble-noted blare. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous?”
“We’re inspectors,” said Kasyx ambiguously.
“You can’t come down ’ere,” the misshapen man repeated.
“We have to,” said Kasyx.
“You’re not allowed to,” the misshapen man insisted, taking a threatening step towards them.
Keldak started to peel off his left-hand glove; but Kasyx leaned towards Mol Besa and Keldak and whispered, “Remember—he’s a figment of Isabel Gowdie’s dream. She’s checking us out, protecting herself.”
He was right. The misshapen man circled around them, eyeing them up and down. His face constantly altered as he looked at them: his chin bulging, his cheeks sinking, his forehead sloping. But after he had completed a full circle, he said, in a peculiarly feminine voice, “All right. You can take a look around if you want to.”
He stood aside, and one by one they walked past him and into the massive vestibule of the tunnel. There were lights and generators and trucks everywhere, and miles of snaking cable; and vast yellow-painted earth-boring machines bellowed past them on their way to the tunnel face.
The noise inside the tunnel was shattering. Mol Besa could hardly hear himself think. What Isabel Gowdie must have suffered when the Channel Tunnel company came boring into Shakespeare Cliff, he couldn’t even imagine.
The five of them walked along the tunnel until Mol Besa’s instrument panel told them that they had reached the precise point where the talisman’s signal intersected with the holographic map of the Channel Tunnel. Mol Besa lifted his hand and shouted, “This is it! We’re here! We’ve made it!”
The rest of the Night Warriors stopped and looked around. The tunnel walls were chalk-white and glossy with wet; white and glossy as Knitted Hood’s mask. There were lights everywhere; working-lamps and halogen inspection lamps; so bright that Kasyx had darkened the glass of his visor; but no sign anywhere of Isabel Gowdie.
“You’re sure this is the right place?” Kasyx bellowed at Mol Besa.
Mol Besa lifted the talisman up to the side of his helmet and he could hear it singing: a high-pitched screaming that tore through his ears like the blade of a tile-cutting saw.
“The cross seems to think that it is!” he shouted back. “And my instruments are absolutely sure of it!”
“Then where is she?” Kasyx demanded. “I don’t see her anywhere!”
They prowled up and down, running their hands over the walls, kicking at the floor, staring up at the thirty-foot ceiling. All the time, compressors roared, drills hammered, and workmen shouted to each other.
“She’s not here!” Keldak called out. “If you ask me, dear, she’s been leading you all round the bushes!”
“She’s here!” Mol Besa insisted, jabbing at his instrument panel. “Look at this image … this is the tunnel, and this is where the Celtic cross is creating the maximum signal. It’s audiovisual mathematics, plain and simple. She’s here!”
“All right, then, if she’s here, where is she?” Keldak demanded. “If you’re so incredibly clever, where?”
It was then that Zasta tugged at Mol Besa’s arm. Mol Besa looked down at him and saw that Zasta was pointing halfway up the drilted-chalk tunnel wall. “What?” he said. “What is it?” But Zasta said simply, “Look.”
Mol Besa peered up at the wall. At first he couldn’t see anything at all. But gradually he realized what he was looking at. There were four small protrusions on the surface of the chalk, no larger than fingertips. And that is what they were, fingertips. The Channel Tunnel drilling machines had missed Isabel Gowdie’s imprisoned body by less than twelve inches, although they had broken away just enough of the solid chalk to expose her fingertips.
Mol Besa stood for almost half a minute, staring at those fingertips. They belonged to a woman who had been incarcerated for over three centuries in solid white limestone: a woman whose evil had been so fearful that the Night Warriors had found it necessary to seal her and bind her and keep her imprisoned in the deepest cliff they could find. Only the unforeseeable progress of civil engineering had released Isabel Gowdie from her eternal bondage; only a circumstance which would have seemed beyond imagination in 1666—even to those who were used to running through the wildest imaginings of dreaming men and women.
Kasyx shouted, “She’s still trapped! But all she needed was the smallest access to the outside world—that would have been more than enough for her to wake up her Carriers!”
“What do you suggest we do?” asked Mol Besa.
“We have to dig her out of there, first of all. Then you and she have to do the business … otherwise you’re going to be stuck with that Night Plague for all eternity. Then we have to zap her.”
“Easy, no problem,” said Mol Besa with undisguised sarcasm.
“It won’t be, believe me!” Kasyx yelled back. “Keldak! Effis! Zasta! Keep guard! I’m going to chisel this lady out of the rock!”
“But this is only a dream!” Mol Besa shouted.
“That’s right! She was imprisoned in a dream, we can dig her out in a dream!”
“But if it’s only a dream, how come she was freed by the real digging of the real Channel Tunnel?”
“Because, my friend, her body was buried in the waking world, while her soul was buried in the dream world. You can’t bury a soul in the waking world, it will never rest … as anyone who has ever had a dream about a dead husband or a dead wife or a dead friend will tell you. By the same token, you can’t bury somebody’s fleshly body in the dream world, either. That’s why people find it so important to physically bury their dead. The Night Warriors buried Isabel Gowdie in both waking and dreaming states … just to make absolutely sure that she could never escape, never again.”
“And now we’re going to dig her out?” asked Mol Besa, looking up at the wet chalk wall with awe.
Kasyx nodded. “That’s right, Mol Besa. Now we’re going to dig her out.”
Mol Besa looked at him narrowly. “Supposing I told you that I didn’t want to do this? That I’d rather leave her where she is? I mean, surely we can cover up her fingers, and that’ll seal her off again.”
“Mol Besa, you have the Night Plague,” Kasyx shouted back. “Thousands of British kids have the Night Plague, too. This woman is feeding it; this woman is Satan’s soup kitchen. You have to get rid of your own infection; and then make sure that everybody else gets rid of it, too. You have to!”
Mol Besa nodded. He felt as if his head were bursting apart. Kasyx beckoned to Keldak and shouted in his ear, “Target your fist to knock away the wall … a cuboid, okay? About that size. I don’t want her injured. It looks like she’s probably caught up in some kind of struggling posture … you see what I mean? One hand out in front of her, and the other one behind, like she’s running through solid chalk.”
Keldak looked quickly at Kasyx and then said, “Okay … I’ll do what I can.”
The Night Warriors stood away from the limestone wall; all except Keldak, who approached it slowly, sizing it up with foxy, perceptive, calculating eyes. As he did so, he peeled off his left glove, and the well-lit tunnel workings were even more brightly lit by the beams of solid energy that radiated from his fist. His fist was so dazzling, in fact, that Mol Besa had to shield his eyes with his hand; and then, his eyes swimming with dozens of afterimages of Keldak’s fingers, Mol Besa had to turn away as well.
The holographic satellite that floated in the air on the left side of Keldak’s helmet orbited silently through ninety degrees until it was hovering in front of his facepiece. Keldak programmed it deftly and competently … creating within its target parameters a six-foot cuboid in the limestone wall in front of them … a block of chalk which would contain Isabel Gowdie, entire and unhurt.
“I hope this works,” he told Kasyx nervously. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Kasyx smiled. “Sure you’ve done it before. You’ve probably done it hundreds of times before. Keldak was mentioned in one of the earliest Night Warriors chronicles that I’ve ever seen … way back in the thirteenth century. Just because you’ve forgotten that you’ve done this before, that doesn’t mean you can’t remember how to do it.”
“If you say so,” Keldak replied without much conviction.
His holographic globe swung smoothly back to its “parked” position on the left side of his helmet. He slowly lifted his left arm, with its blindingly-bright fist, and for two or three seconds he closed his eyes tight, concentrating.
“Come on, Keldak, now’s the time,” Kasyx encouraged him.
Keldak arched his back, stiffened his arm, and shouted out, “Ashapola!”
His fist flew from his wrist with an ear-splitting rush like a subway train. It struck the curved chalk wall and hammered right into it, hosing a spray of pulverized limestone behind it. It disappeared completely into the rock, although flickering shafts of blinding white light played through the dust as it furiously chiseled out the cuboid that Keldak had programmed it to cut for him.
There was already so much noise in the tunnel that the hammering of Keldak’s fist went unnoticed. But Effis and Zasta still kept watch on the tunnel entrance, where trucks and workmen came and went, and sheets of rain still poured steadily down from a gray and doleful sky.
More chalk dust spurted out of the groove that Keldak’s fist had cut. Then, for a while, the light subsided, as the fist cut out the back of the cuboid, which would detach the block from the tunnel wall. Keldak raised his left arm, and already a second fist was forming on the stump of his wrist, to replace the one which was exhuming Isabel Gowdie.
“You ever deal with a witch before?” Mol Besa shouted.
Kasyx shook his head. “One or two demons. Never a witch.”
“I’m scared,” said Mol Besa.
“What of? Yourself or the witch?”
“Myself, mostly. I don’t know what I might do.”
“Just hang in there,” Kasyx replied. “If you think you’re going to need help, just don’t hesitate to ask for it. Night Warriors work together, remember. We’re a team.”
Mol Besa nodded. But all the same, he was beginning to feel the stirrings of some extraordinary blackness inside him, like a stick stirring molasses. His blood jangled through his veins, and he was breathing in short, stressful gasps. I’ve found her, he thought. I’ve found her at last. Now she can change the world in the way that she was always meant to change the world. Now she can spread the Night Plague from pole to pole.
He swallowed dryly and glanced quickly at Keldak to make sure that Keldak hadn’t picked up any psychic echoes. In dreams, you never knew what powers other people might have; what inspirations. Keldak, however, was much too busy watching his dazzling fist hammer out the last of the limestone block. His green armor was covered by a fine film of chalk dust, and he had raised his visor so that he could see better.
Mol Besa looked towards Effis. Behind her lacework mask, Effis’s eyes appeared unusually dark, and when she realized that Mol Besa was watching her, she bared her teeth in the briefest of suggestive grins. It was a grin that said I’ll do things to you that you never imagined possible. I’ll love you and I’ll hurt you, you bastard. I’ll love you till you bleed. So she was being affected, too. The Night Plague had infected them both with the lust and cruelty and faithlessness of Satan; and here they were, only feet away from Satan’s favorite servant. Their stomachs churned with nausea; their arteries were burning. The baleful influence of Isabel Gowdie grew stronger and stronger with every hammer of Keldak’s fist.
There was a clattering tumble of rocks and heavy lurching noise. Keldak’s fist had now smashed its way all around the limestone block. All that remained now was for the block to be forced out of the tunnel wall. Keldak swung his holographic globe around again and retargeted it. His second fist flashed from his wrist, zwafffff! blinding them all with its magnesium-bright flare. It vanished into the groove around the block in a brilliant interplay of dust and light. There was a second’s pause, and then it detonated all of its energy at once, forcing the block to shudder two feet out of the rock face.
When the dust had settled, Kasyx stepped forward and laid his hand on the block. “Mol Besa, you and I can lift this out between us. If you can just give us a little mathematical assistance …”
Mol Besa punched three different equations into his instrument panel. The first postulated freezing the air just below the lower edge of the block, to form a ramp of ice down which they could slide the block with the minimum of effort. The second suggested sending this whole section of the tunnel wall far into the future, to a time when Shakespeare Cliff would have been worn away by natural erosion. The third was simply to create a localized vacuum just in front of the block, so that it would be forced out of the tunnel wall by the surrounding air pressure.
He checked the comparative energy levels which these differing solutions would require. The vacuum pull would be the noisiest and the most untidy, but by far the least extravagant. They needed to be thrifty with their power: especially if Knitted Hood caught up with them before they managed to destroy Isabel Gowdie.
“All right, let’s stand clear,” he said. “I’m going to evacuate a cuboid of air exactly equivalent to the size of the block, so the block will be pushed right out of the tunnel wall to fill it. Once it’s out, it’s going to drop two feet, and that’s probably going to damage it. So watch out for flying debris.”
“And watch out for Isabel Gowdie, too,” warned Kasyx. “She’s one powerful witch, and she’s been imprisoned in this cliff for three hundred years, so she’s going to be seriously pissed.”
Mol Besa loaded his vacuum equation into a cartridge and then slotted the cartridge into his gun. “Are you ready?” he asked Kasyx.
Kasyx nodded. “Let’s do it. Ms. Gowdie wants out, and out is what site’s going to get. But let’s just remember one thing, huh? This is her dream, she controls it, and we’re just here under sufferance. If things look for a moment like they’re going wrong, that’s the moment we pull the plug and exit. We can always get her another day.”
“Says you,” put in Effis.
Kasyx didn’t quite know how to take that comment, but lifted his hand and said, “All right, Mol Besa. Let’s get this block out of the wall, shall we?” All the same, he kept his eyes on Effis. Behind the mask of a Night Warrior, he could detect the voice of somebody who was already half suborned to Satan.
As Kasyx turned away, something in Mol Besa’s head whispered SATAN. He looked around, his hair prickling. He didn’t realize that Isabel Gowdie had picked up the name of her Master from Kasyx’s thoughts, and amplified them through solid limestone in a desperate cri de coeur.
SATAN, the voice echoed and reechoed, like the voice of somebody falling and falling down an endless nightmare well. SATAN is the pestilence that was—
“Promised,” said Effis. The other Night Warriors stared at her: all except Mol Besa, who knew exactly what she meant. Without any further hesitation, he pulled the double triggers of his equation gun, and the cartridge flashed into the air and exploded right in front of the limestone block.
Mol Besa knew that he was converting mathematical formulae into pure energy, but he hadn’t seen an equation cartridge explode before. Glittering numbers burst through the air like a napalmed bowl of alphabet soup, actual numbers and letters, 1/√(1 – v2/ c2) m mo/√(1 – v2/c2). They tumbled and whirled, and then assembled themselves into thin sparkling lines of tingling incandescent energy.
“God Almighty,” said Effis; and then the huge limestone block was wrenched out of the tunnel wall with a thunderous rush, and collapsed on to the tunnel floor, falling over on to its side and splitting from one corner to the other.
The Celtic cross around Mol Besa’s neck shrieked so piercingly that it made his teeth ache. He tugged it away from him, breaking the string, and thrust it into one of the wallets around his waist.
There was a moment’s pause, while the chalk dust gradually settled, and large pieces of limestone dropped off the sides of the block and fell cloaking on to the tunnel floor. Mol Besa quickly looked around, but none of the workers in the tunnel appeared to be taking any notice of what they were doing … presumably because Isabel Gowdie didn’t want them to. They were creations of her imagination; they would do whatever she wished.
Suddenly, a startling white light shone from the center of the broken block. It streamed out in all directions, like the sun rising over the Arctic, like a blinding welding torch, white white totally white death white bone white eye-blinding white. It was so brilliant that, by comparison, Keldak’s fist looked like a dull light bulb.
Large rugged triangular lumps of chalk began to fall away. The block was disintegrating in front of their eyes. The dazzle from inside it was so intense that all of them darkened their visors or shielded their eyes. The energy was pure white but there was no question at all about its origins. It was the power of total absolute evil. It was Satan’s power: relentlessly destructive, like unshielded radiation. The kind of power that could pass right through your body and phosphorize your bones and curse your family’s genes for generation after generation, one distorted chromosome after another.
