The Power

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

An ancient Power awakes. A modern evil mushrooms into apocalypse. Cocooned in a nightmare world, the village of Melfort waits, as The Power feeds on the death and destruction, fuelling its gross appetite. And the dead rise up.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 240

Sample

If the world is a living creature with forests of hair and baldy deserts, with skin of soil and breath of air and sweat of sea, if the earth is a beast with ribs of rock and mineral veins, stomach of oil and lungs of gas, heart and bowels of hot deep magma–

– then a diabolus is a boil, a cyst crammed with filth, a rotten appendix, walled off by tissue, but festering inside.

If it’s poked it can erupt, as a wasps’ nest erupts. Squeeze the cyst and its powers emerge like some hallucinatory poisonous pus which can grant desires (for a while) and accomplish curses, which taints and torments what it touches.

A ‘bolus’ is a good old doctors’ name for a large medicinal pill. Pills fight disease, or are supposed to. That other sort of bolus – diabolus – causes mortal sickness, madness, terror. It destroys like a tumour of the flesh, cancer of the mind.

Diaboli lurk in definite nooks in the world’s skin. Equally, they are fiends inhabiting the psyche of the planet; things of will-power, nightmare, hatred, lust which certain passwords can awake, which certain rituals, symbols, states of consciousness can unbind.

Mostly diaboli lie dormant, walled off by the health of the world. A few shamans sought the passwords in paleolithic tongues back when word and object seemed to be the same, when people and the world were one. Dire names of diaboli were handed down. Magicians, witches would hypnotise and drug and starve themselves. They would pledge their souls. They would sacrifice babies and virgins. They would torture prisoners. All in order to nudge a diabolus, hoping to control and channel it – for a while, till it mastered them and dragged them screaming into itself.

Some people can never leave power alone – any more than other people want to avoid building thermonuclear cysts to burst the heat of the sun and poison breath over battlefields and cities. In the flesh of England hides a diabolus, appendix of black, corrupting power….

Or did those crazy shamans and warlocks, and all that agony, rage, and lust, put the diabolus there in the first place? Gradually, through the long millenia from the old dream-time, did it gather its power from the sicknesses of the human heart? Did the conquering, domineering, two-legged creatures who had sprouted brains actually animate all the malady into a slumbering entity, one among many?

Jeni glanced up, and the spire of St Mary’s was toppling upon her.

To squash her flat and messy as a cowpat, hamburger her body, hammer her into the turf littered with sheep turds. She staggered, gasping.

The sentinel-spire was still in the same position, was still tumbling.

Rising from a chunky, Norman-style tower, the steep pyramid of blue slates was patchworked by green replacements. Louvred belfry windows were inset under double-curved ogee arches. The stone summit-ball clasped a spike where a golden weathercock perched, twitching in the wind….

She realized that the little white cumuli rushing overhead were making her see the spire heel over upon her. St Mary’s, Melfort Parva, wasn’t moving – just the clouds.

Several of the hugely pregnant Masham ewes in the churchyard bleated in unison. Had they smelt her panic on the wind, read it in the jerk of her body?

Above the clouds the lazy dart of an F-111 drifted. Its hushed thunder had made her look up, but the noise of the fighter-bomber wouldn’t have bothered the sheep. Too familiar. She hated the American jet and wished it would fall, then hastily unwished her wish. At the base, ten F-111s were always kept fully loaded with nuclear weapons in the high security, quick response area, codename “Victor”. Given the international news, who could be sure that an F-111 on ordinary patrol didn’t have nukes aboard? If it crashed, its bombs wouldn’t explode, of course, but casings might split. Plutonium could disperse on the wind, a single grain enough to poison a person.

Supposing a warhead did explode five miles away due east – a direct hit on the Kerthrop base – the tower and spire of St Mary’s might shade Jeni briefly from the light, the heat. Moments later the entire church would disintegrate, hurled westwards.

Yet she stepped from the shade of that spire which wished to crush her, into bright sunlight and the cutting March wind. As she hugged her anorak to her a few flakes of snow flurried by. Like radioactive ash. No, ash wouldn’t be so white. Catching a flake on her fingertip she tasted it, pure and cold. Perhaps not so pure! Now that the F-111 had passed over, angel of death, a feathery contrail frayed and fluffed out. The snowflakes might be children of a previous jet’s exhaust, or of the same one, circling round.

Along the boundary of the churchyard a line of eroded headstones stood shoulder to shoulder like Roman shields of rock locked together against an enemy. The older graves, from which those stones had been pulled, formed a humpy sward knobbed with sheep droppings. In the stones’ lee, snowdrops dangled bunches of waxy white bells; crocuses showed purple tips. A church-size shadow hurried by, dulling colours; just as swiftly the curtain lifted.

Jeni spied the vicar emerging from the south door. The Reverend Jeremy Partridge, in his Dracula gear: voluptuous velvety black cloak with soaring collar and silver chain across the breastbone. How much had Partridge paid from his meagre stipend for that magnificent garment, which surely wasn’t any standard item of ecclesiastical regalia? Though only a rural Anglican vicar, Partridge dressed like some prince of the church, a cardinal in exile.

But Partridge wasn’t married; no wife or kids to support. It was the part-time home-help, goiterous, intrusive Mrs Enid Jackson (“You got a neck, Missus!”) who directed Jeni up here this morning. Naturally Mrs Busybody knew where the vicar was. She probably knew by telepathy what Jeni wanted to ask Partridge.

He had mannerisms, that one. When he dropped in to the White Lion for a G and T or two the vicar could become quite ultraviolet in his act, his voice fluting in high scales of self-parody. Was he a repressed homosexual? (“No choirboys for me, thanks! I have Christ – but how about another itsy-bitsy splash of Gordon’s?”) However, the vicar wasn’t always foppish. Partridge had a sharp satiric tongue when he cared to use it, in defence of faith, virtues, and his church.

Hereabouts, virtue included poshing up the vacant school house next to the C of E endowed primary school to rent to a USAF family from the base. When Old Donaldson retired as headmaster after umpteen years, new head-teacher Miss Samuels hadn’t wanted the big, tatty pile. She was buying her own place. The advantages of renting to the US military were twofold. With their lavish housing allowance, Americans would pay well over the odds; and they would sign short-term agreements unbound by British tenant law. The house had to come up to standard, but you could easily get rid of your Americans and milk them meanwhile to top up the diocesan coffers.

Whenever a church needed repairs, how curiously empty the coffers seemed to be! – leading to innumerable pig roasts, barn dances, raffles and other modern forms of medieval tithes. The Church Commissioners, amongst the richest landlords in the realm, recently cashed the imposing Melfort vicarage in for a cool quarter of a million to a scrap metal dealer, shifting their vicar into a convenient little bungalow; this windfall seemed to have no earthly connexion with church repair bills.

True, the Church Times had spoken out against American military adventures, and the Archbish of Canterbury himself had criticized the US bases in Britain. To what real effect, when the church was busily renting property to US personnel?

As County Council governor of Melfort’s primary school – the Labour Party nominee – Jeni had spoken out six months ago against the rental scheme. Already there were a couple of other American families living in the village. Proven decent folk! The people who lived off base usually were the cream, the adaptable ones. Chirpy Captain Ron Diamond was, for God’s sake, an F-111 pilot; with wife Sheri and little boy Felix they’d run a popcorn stall at last summer’s village fete, decorated all over with the Stars and Stripes. Quiet Ed and Mary Kuzka had lived in Britain for years and were half-way anglicized; he was a civilian employee in charge of transient billeting, though he’d formerly been on active service in Vietnam. The Kuzkas’ youngest daughter, teenage Carol, still lived with them and hung out in the White Lion with the local teenagers – she never wanted to go back to the States. But but but.

During the governors’ meeting, Jeni had enquired pointedly whether Melfort’s tender infants should be taught cheek by jowl with somebody whose basic business was nuclear war, next door to some possible Rambo from Little Rock; nowadays the base was sucking in extra personnel from the States and siphoning them around wherever spare housing existed. She’d speculated whether the rent was thirty pieces of silver. Partridge’s tongue had lashed her – momentarily. The other school managers thought that renting to the American military was a fine, sensible idea.

Old Donaldson wouldn’t have countenanced it, if he’d had any say. But Miss Samuels, bright spark though she was, was no match for the vicar. What a good idea Jeni had thought it at the time to appoint a go-ahead young woman headteacher to work with the two part-time teachers, Mrs Braithwaite and Mrs Vanderzee, instead of having another man in charge. Parental squeals as to how their male offspring would learn proper football had struck her as ludicrous, reactionary. However, Miss Samuels was a practising, obedient Christian, the consequences of which Jeni had rather left out of her calculations.

At least now that so much barbed wire sealed off the Kerthrop base there wouldn’t be any more merry school trips there; not now that all minor gates were blocked and armed guards ran 100% ID checks at the sandbagged open gates, causing morning tailbacks. Ever since Libya.

“Vicar!”

Jeni hurried over, wondering how in heaven’s name the vicar could refuse a request to support peace. A few local churches had already agreed to cooperate in the Easter festival, but Jeni suspected Partridge’s answer – though she would never have foreguessed his reason.

“Miss Wallis.” Partridge stressed the “Miss”. “Such a pleasure, on a fine spring morning.”

Jeni was thirty-five, and unmarried. And why should that be? She was sultry-looking, smouldery. Quite slim and dark; not tall. Jet hair trimmed to her shoulders. Wild sloe eyes. A gypsy lass, her Dad used to say in offended bemusement. Passionate – about certain things.

Yet not wedded, not a mother. Not properly adult. Immature … politically. Too hectic. Not quite a full or responsible member of society; that’s what the “Miss” said to her. Never mind that she’d been a schoolteacher for years, was a governor et bloody cetera; that’s what local Tory worthies thought of her.

“It’s freezing, Vicar. And there’s snow in the air.”

“Matter of perspective. The sun shines, and the bulbs push up. God’s earth renews itself. Don’t be a pessimist, Miss Wallis. Pessimism tarnishes the heart.”

“And the war planes cruise overhead.”

Another distant soft drum of thunder had reached Jeni’s ears. St Mary’s stood on a modest eminence; thatches and steep-pitched slate roofs descended in several directions. Miles east beyond farmland and the far knoll of Hobby Hill she spied another dirty dart lift itself into the sky from RAF Kerthrop. As the jet climbed it rolled steeply northward to avoid overflying the market town of Churtington, which was out of sight by day but aglow by night, though the glow from the base housing and perimeter floodlights increasingly eclipsed it.

F-111 Is usually went up high quite quickly. Low-level flying – contour-hugging down valleys, over chimney tops – that was the prerogative of the noisier, exhaust-spewing RAF Phantoms. Those kept clear of the immediate Kerthrop patch; American air space. Small mercies.

RAF Kerthrop. Royal Air Force – what a sick joke. Half a dozen British officers to answer the phone amiably, and five thousand members of the USAF zillionth Tactical Fighter Wing. With dependants, fifteen thousand?

During the “Day of Disruption” last year when CND members had pledged to tie up the phone lines all day long, for her part Jeni had begun ordering a whole menu of Chinese take-away food the moment the phone was picked up. (“I’d like number 23, Shrimps Chow Mein. Number 44, Special Foo Yung. Number 68, Roast Duck with Bean-sprouts. Two helpings of number 88, Egg Fried Rice….”) The RAF biffo had chortled with amusement. Damn him for a fool, he should have been furious. But hadn’t she been just an itsy-bitsy… politically immature? (Oh no. Immature politics all happened ages ago. In that frantic, fervent Trotskyist time at Oxford.)

“Maybe,” said Partridge, “you should ask the Kremlin to give its poor, overworked pilots a well-deserved rest?”

“We do support Soviet nuclear disarmament.”

“Ah, but does your average Ivan enjoy the freedom to support anything?”

And in Jeni’s head the fading voice of Trotsky’s heirs chorused, “Not likely! The Soviet Union is a state capitalist bureaucratic tyranny. A fossilized statist oligarchy.”

“Shut up,” she told herself, “that’s robot-talk. Chicken with its head chopped off.” She wasn’t going to get bogged down in some stupid, point-scoring debate which would all be water off the vicar’s Dracula-cloaked back. So far as he was concerned, the Soviet leadership were atheists who put the boot into practising Christians.

She shrugged. “I want to ask you something.”

“Maybe we should step inside?” Partridge swooped back to the wire-mesh door which kept invading pigeons out of the porch, and thrust it wide. “It is a teeny trifle frigid, out.”

As the wire mesh clashed shut on its spring, the stout Main door of battered, blackened, worm-holed oak yawned inward to the vicar’s push.

The nave felt refrigerated, though at least the wind-chill factor was absent. This could only be the second occasion that Jeni had set foot inside St Mary’s. (“Mustn’t encourage the buggers.”) Since her “tourist” visit of four years earlier she’d quite forgotten the interior: of white plastered walls inlaid with brass memorial plaques, fine vaulted timber roof, great arch separating off the altar end. Vases of early forced daffodils stood about. The stained glass was mostly mediocre. Oh yes, and there was the relic.

Mounted on the wall at head height next to the pulpit there jutted a padlocked iron cage reminiscent of a sprung man-trap. Inside was a worn stone reliquary which consisted of a miniature turret with a gabled lid. This object had been dug from inside a wall during Victorian renovations. It held, she recalled, a throat bone supposedly from some martyr. A larynx bone; the silenced, skeletal voice of St Somebody, identity uncertain. Maybe St Boniface. Bonny Face.

How highfalutin’ and quasi-Roman for a rural Anglican church to house a relic! The reliquary must have been hidden away during the Reformation.

Was it the relic that had attracted Jeremy Partridge to the parish of Melfort? If indeed vicars did choose their destinations. Jeni remembered hearing on the radio that a good number of vicars these days were refusing to accept inner city slum appointments. (“One must heed the welfare of one’s family, mustn’t one?”) If vicars were able to reject a billet maybe they could also request one, particularly if they had connexions; as Partridge, with his airs, surely did.

If St Mary’s had indeed been a Catholic church the relic would have been enshrined more nobly, in some golden vessel studded with gems – not stuck in a stone ashtray inside a rusty man-trap. The sight of it made Jeni feel creepy. Throat-bone, stone, dust. Did its presence exalt the vicar?

“Easter,” she said to him. “Festival of the Prince of Peace.”

“To be sure. Three weeks come Sunday. Then I can down my next ginnypoo.”

She stared at him, baffled.

“Lent, you know. One gives up things.”

“Yes, well on the subject of giving up things, as you know there’s a peace camp outside our local base.”

“Oh, I heard they were being evicted.”

“They’re on a thin neck of land just alongside the bridle path, and as it happens nobody can prove ownership. Not the MOD, or the farm next door. It’s free land.” In fact, a token attempt had been made by the council to declare the camp a nuisance so as to evict under the Public Health Act; an enforcement notice had been posted, but never enforced.

“Don’t they rather clutter the path, even so?”

“They’ve a perfect right to use the lane, since it’s on the definitive map of the country. The right of way has never been abolished or extinguished.”

“Dear me, how technical.”

“In fact the base fence is illegal because it cuts the bridle path, and there ought to be a five-foot wide gate in it for the public.”

“To picnic on the runway?”

She ignored this. “If the campers were ‘cluttering’ the lane the police could do them for obstruction of a public highway – just as they ought to do the MOD.” She glanced at the concealed fragment of martyr. “I think those campers are modern saints, Vicar. The today equivalent. In the cold, in the mud. No mains light or water.”

“Nor sanitation,” Partridge tutted.

“They dig deep latrine pits, and they bury all their rubbish. Saints, Vicar. Poverty willingly embraced. Lack of material possessions and comforts.”

“Don’t they draw dole money, then? I heard there was some trouble at the Crown in Kerthrop. Your campers were drinking up their unemployment pay, weren’t they? Apparently there was a fight. A broken arm. Your friends got themselves barred.”

“That was the fault of some redneck Yanks and local yobbos. Plus the landlord.”

“Deplorable.”

“I mean it. Those rednecks terrorize the camp at night, when the weather’s warm. They get tanked up and chuck stones. When they get a chance, they swerve their cars at the campers. Not the blacks from the base; they’re laid back. But the whites do. The campers face the forces of Herod. As it were.”

Partridge smiled ruefully.

“Those aren’t sanctimonious saints, Vicar. They’re practical, down-to-earth ones.”

“I’m sure they’re extremely down-to-earth.”

“A lot of respectable people visit them, you know. People who care. A Dominican monk stayed overnight last week. And last month a curate who’s in Christian CND –”

“Brought them a basket of eggs?”

“Anyway, there’s to be a big peace festival at Kerthrop at Easter. Blessed be the peace-makers, hmm? We thought . . .