For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Page 11

  “I’ll be brief,” Admiral Frederick Clemence assured him. “It’s easy enough, as we still know next to nothing.”

  “Hurrah.” Oscar checked his watch. “I’m meeting the Prime Minister in ten minutes so you have little choice.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Of course he does, as to whether he believes...”

  “At this stage, I’m not sure anybody does... a doorway to Hell popping up in the middle of America?”

  “Indeed, though if any country were to possess one they are certainly well-suited. What word from your man?”

  Clemence retrieved a telegram from his pocket and handed it to his superior. “It’s hardly illuminating.”

  Oscar read it and nodded. “Just so, it simply confirms the newspaper reports. What is the point in having an operative on foreign soil if all he tells you is something you could read in the Times?” Not that that was, in itself, unusual, he had to admit. If only he had John Walter’s resources he was sure there was little in the world that would escape his attention.

  “I have instructed him to continue his observation and report every other day unless something suitably earth-shattering occurs,” Clemence continued. “We have a team of people en route, but it will be another three days before they arrive at New York, let alone set their sights on the town itself. At present, Atherton’s the only man we have.”

  “Is he reliable?”

  Clemence took a moment to consider the question. After all, Atherton had been perfectly reliable in the work he had undertaken on behalf of Her Majesty, the concern was whether this was really the job for a man of his talents. Given a choice, Clemence would have sent someone with a more gentle temperament. “He’s always followed orders,” he said in the end, though this wasn’t really answering the question.

  “Well then,” said Oscar, “we shall just have to hope he continues to do so and doesn’t cause us any embarrassment in the meantime. He does understand the delicacy of this situation?”

  “Of course.” Clemence hoped that were true.

  “Because this is the unknown staring us in the face,” Oscar continued. “I hesitate to even speculate, but can you imagine our response should all of this turn out to be true? What is any world power to do when faced with the possibility that it has become completely, irrevocably, outranked overnight? We own half the damn world, Admiral, we’d own the rest if we had any interest in it, and yet still, compared to this... to possessing the entirety of Heaven and Hell in your back garden, it counts as nothing.”

  “It can’t be true.”

  “I would agree with you, certainly the alternative is to talk madness. Before the initial reports I considered the living embodiment of Hell to be Brighton on a Bank Holiday, but if it is true...”

  “If it is then the world as we know it is, if you’ll excuse the expression, righteously buggered.”

  Oscar laughed. “That it is, old chap, that it is. Perhaps it’s best we enjoy the last few days we have left, eh? If we’re all going to Hell we may as well earn it.”

  2.

  PHINEAS TRUMP ALWAYS got his story. Even if he had to make it up. Still, he had to admit that even on a particularly imaginative day—and he’d been known to invent entire wars—he would never have typed a word of the stories he heard coming out of Nebraska.

  “They say it’s Heaven itself,” his editor had told him, “crash-landed in the dirt like a duck full of buckshot.”

  “Someone’s been drinking,” Trump told him. Certainly both of them had.

  “There’s a mass exodus of folks heading out from there, all telling the same story. Meanwhile, here you are cluttering up the office.”

  “Working.”

  “Not on anything like this, get on a train damn you, or I’ll stab you to death with your goddamn pen.”

  When put like that, of course, Trump didn’t see he had much room for argument so did as he was told and headed west.

  By the time he’d halfway completed his journey, his natural cynicism had taken a pounding. News travelled in a wave and he had met the crest of that news head on. When starting his journey he had been surrounded by nothing but the usual traveller conversation, complaints about service, dents to luggage and the rudeness of porters. By the time he hit Columbus, people were talking about a ridiculous story they had heard from ‘this guy in a bar/restroom/ticket line’. Once the train window was looking out at Springfield every passenger was telling the story, a sea of conflicting explanations as to what might have caused the ‘hallucinations’. By Des Moines it was a matter of fact and people wanted to know what the President intended to do about it.

  Trump had gone from feeling a fool for covering it to an idiot for being so behind the times. Still, he told himself, it was hardly his fault if world-breaking news chose to emerge in Nebraska. I mean, Nebraska... Hadn’t God heard of the East Coast?

  Getting off the train at Alliance, a small town hoping to grow fat on the railroad like a tick latched on to a vein, Trump was relieved to find the Tribune had secured him a horse on which to continue his journey. If they hadn’t thought to plan ahead Trump would have been walking the rest of the way. Alliance was filled with people who had heard the stories and wanted to see more. Folks were paying a fortune to hire transport and the town was struggling to keep up with demand.

  He had imagined riding out there on his own, cursing the heat and the discomfort of a few hours in the saddle for the sake of a drunkard’s fable. As it was, the road was filled with travellers. Enterprising locals had set up a business in ferrying the curious, cramming their carts and coaches to intolerable levels as they made the journey to and fro. Copy rushed through his head as he jostled his way amongst the crowds, allusions to the Biblical exodus, evoking the clamour of the faithful and their choruses of hymns as they marched towards enlightenment (this was window-dressing of the highest order, there was no singing as the travellers made their way across the flat grasslands, just the low murmur of conversation and the frequent ejection of gas from the horses).

  He ended up in the company of several other reporters, all deciding that the notion of an exclusive was as remote now as their destination so why not just pool resources?

  “I heard the place is filled to the brim with monsters,” said Jonas Beloved, a writer for the Boston Daily Advertiser whose reputation didn’t match his name, “things the like of which you never before set your eyes on.”

  “My eyes have seen a fair amount,” Christopher Bridges, of the Jeffersonian Republican, replied, “so I’ll reserve judgement on that.”

  Such reserve was in short supply after they had been forced to navigate the body of a creature twice the size of a luxury hotel that had expired blocking the road. To begin with people surrounded it cautiously, waiting for the first soul brave enough to give it a jab with a long stick. After an hour or so, kids were jumping up and down on the tip of its tail and one wily group had begun peeling off its scales with crowbars, mindful of selling them on to the folks back home.

  “Still think people are exaggerating?” someone asked Bridges as they continued on their way. He didn’t grace the question with a reply.

  3.

  ATHERTON LAY ON his back beneath the shade of a rock and imagined ways in which he might make his employers suffer. He had only been here two days and he was already suffocated by inaction. For every hour they did nothing, the problem grew bigger and he was at a loss as to why his Whitehall paymasters seemed ignorant of the fact. “Just observe,” they ordered. He had seen all he needed to see during the half an hour he had spent on Wormwood’s streets. It was a place that simply couldn’t be allowed to continue its infestation of the world. The longer it sat there, a wide-open gateway allowing filth to spill out, the more difficult it would ever be to close it. What was needed was action, something major and decisive, and if the people that issued his insipid orders didn’t see that then maybe he needed to take matters into his own hands.

  But what? And how?

  H
is little private army of monks and worshippers—and he was confident enough in his ability to control people that they were his army, not Father Martin’s—were hardly worth the box of ammunition he carried in his bag. They were weak, undernourished civilians, not a true fighting man amongst them. If he marched them in to battle then they would die and that would be that.

  Atherton had no problem with that, he felt nothing for these people, but he failed to see what advantage their deaths would offer.

  Another concern: once the others Admiral Clemence was sending arrived, what would happen then? Politics? Talking? Compromise? He suspected so. He had been present at such deliberations often enough, they began with determined promises and ended with inaction treated as if it were a victory. Besides, once the Americans had become thoroughly entrenched in the business—he had watched what had clearly been an official party enter the town that morning—then the battle would be over. It would no longer be a case of taking on Wormwood, it would be a case of taking on America and he knew for a fact that his government wouldn’t give that serious consideration.

  So, how to act? What could he do to force the hand of those that would, in his absence, do nothing at all?

  He closed his eyes, blanketed out the sound of the camp and began to plan.

  4.

  FATHER MARTIN TRIED to remember what it had been like not to question every single action. Not so long ago, life had been simple, it had been about books, dust and whatever was eating the leaves of the peach trees in the monastery garden. Now it was one moral confusion after another.

  He had no doubt that the existence of Wormwood was a disaster waiting to happen, but not because of those who lived on the other side of the town but rather the effect they had on the mortals who didn’t. He looked at the mood of the camp, the people becoming angrier and more violent day by day, and wondered how bad it would get if things were allowed to continue.

  He had tried to preach calmness but that was a hopeless proposition. He no more believed that the problem of Wormwood could be solved by gentle consideration than the rest of the camp. So what did that leave? Violence? And where did that leave him as a man of God? If indeed, there were any God left to be a man of.

  He was a man utterly adrift, with no idea of his place in the world.

  What he wouldn’t give to return to a life of spraying the peach trees.

  5.

  DUGGAN MCDAID CLUTCHED his satchel of paperwork close to his chest and hoped it might help protect him as his carriage was driven through the barrier into Wormwood. To most people, sheaves of documentation, copies of statutes and legal precedents (for which there were certainly none in this case) would feel like little protection at all but McDaid took great comfort from facts in ink. He preferred the world when it was on paper, inarguable, indelible, black and white.

  “Would you just look at this place?” asked one of his companions, “it’s...” and there Algernon Sidney Paddock’s gift for description failed him. Senator for the state of Nebraska, it had only been a matter of time before he visited Wormwood. His only regret was that he couldn’t have put the business off longer than a couple of days. He was by no means sure he was ready for what he was about to meet.

  “Sit down, Algernon,” said the third passenger, William A. Poynter, Nebraska’s Governor. “We’re supposed to present the firm and respectable face of America at these people, not gawp like a kiddie in an aquarium.”

  “Right,” Paddock agreed, dropping back into his seat, “yes. Firm and respectable.”

  Poynter rapped on the roof of the carriage. “Stop here, Jim.”

  The coach came to a halt and Poynter stared at McDaid. “You ready?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Dear God, man, I’m not asking you to do much, just get a good look around. I want to know what this place is really like. To do that I need someone who can explore freely, you get me?”

  “I get you. Sir. Yes, sir.”

  “Then get on with it. We’ll pick you up later.”

  McDaid nodded and clambered out of the coach, still holding his satchel in front of him.

  Poynter shouted once more at the driver and the coach carried on towards the town square and the governor’s house.

  McDaid looked around, half tempted just to walk back to the barrier and wait for his employer to finish his business and leave. He could always say they’d thrown him out, he decided, taken him for a spy and threatened him with violence unless he took his leave. He had thought he’d been brought along to take notes, document the talks between his employer and the authorities in Wormwood. That had been terrifying enough but when Poynter had made his real plan clear McDaid had almost been beside himself. A more creative man, he had decided, would have been able to come up with a speedy excuse. He was not a creative man. He had simply nodded and spent the last hour of their journey in a state of miserable terror.

  He sat down on the edge of the boardwalk and looked up and down the street. It was busy and his eyes struggled to take in some of the more bizarre sights, creatures that looked like characters from the books his mother had read to him as a child, mythical beasts, all fangs and eyes. He was surprised by quite how many of the folk who went about their business were as human as he—or at least appeared so. He saw a family, mother and father ferrying their children towards the general store; a young couple wandering along eating buttered corn; an elderly lady manhandling a bag of groceries as she made her slow and fragile way home. The old woman finally lost the battle against her unruly shopping as she drew next to him.

  “Oh Lord,” she sighed, as the boardwalk was suddenly cluttered with vegetables.

  “Let me help,” he told her, happy to busy himself with something normal, if only to defer acting upon his orders a little longer.

  “You’re a sweetheart,” she told him as he gathered her spilled groceries and placed them back in her bag.

  He looked at her. The little hair she possessed was worn long, her body little more than bones wrapped in layers of cotton and wool. She could have been his grandma. Hell, could have been anybody’s grandma.

  “Are you...” he tried to think of the right word, “normal?”

  “What’s normal, kid?” she asked. “I’d have thought you’d lived enough years to know there ain’t no such thing. I’m mortal, if that’s what you’re asking. Too damned mortal if you ask me, I’ve been knocking on Heaven’s door for years, now I’m so damned weak I have to live next to it in order to reach.”

  “Sorry,” he said, still carrying her bag. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “No matter,” she told him, “carry my shopping for me and I’ll try and make sure something violent doesn’t eat you for being a bigot.”

  He looked around. “Eat me?”

  “Just joshing with you, son, now come on, if I stand still too long I’m liable to take root like Branches over there.” She nodded towards the square but he had no idea what she was referring to and decided not to question her.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked her.

  “Oh, ages,” she replied, “had my son move me out here months back. I wasn’t going to miss this, not for anyone. Had a little place outside for awhile, watched the others roll up as the months went by. Then watched them all roll out again when they decided they didn’t like the look of the place as much as they’d hoped. Course, I’d thought Hodge and I would just come in, take a little look around then go back to Kansas. Didn’t expect to set up a home.”

  “Hodge?”

  “My son, pay attention, I’m too old to repeat myself.”

  “Yes, right, sorry.”

  They had moved off the main street and into a road beyond where a row of houses were being claimed. Families from the mortal world and the Dominion of Circles alike were moving in, making changes, setting up homes.

  “What’s you name, son?” she asked him. “If your mother didn’t bring you up right enough to offer it, I guess I’ll have to do the honours.”


  “McDaid,” he said. “Duggan McDaid. Sorry.”

  “So you keep saying, maybe we should just take it as read. Mine’s Elspeth Gorman.”

  “Pleased to meet you Mrs Gorman,” he smiled, “and my mother brought me up just fine, I’m just a bit in shock is all.”

  “What you doing here Duggan? Fixing to move or just having a nosey?”

  “I’m here with the Governor,” he admitted, only thinking afterwards that perhaps he was supposed to keep that secret. “He and Senator Paddock are meeting up with your man here, to discuss what’s going to happen now that... well, you know....”

  “Politicians,” Elspeth spat in the dirt, “not got much time for ’em, may as well be honest about that. Still, I suppose it was bound to be. Lots of people circling Wormwood right now looking to gain something.”

  They’d arrived at the far end of the street and Elspeth walked up to the front door of a small house. There was a short porch with a balcony above to throw a little shade. Inside there was the sound of hammering. “That’ll be Hodge,” she said, “probably saw us coming and thought he’d better get busy.”

  She stepped inside, McDaid following on behind.

  “Just put the food down by the stove,” she told him, moving to the stairs. “Hodge, quit your racket and come and meet our guest.” She looked at him. “You drink coffee?”

  “Sure. I mean, that would be lovely.”

  “Then sit down and I’ll make us all some.”

  He took a seat by the window, looking out on the neighbours, a pair of men whose skin was as black as the stove Elspeth was cooking on and covered in fine hairs. One of the men was whipping the other with a carpet beater, an act of ablution rather than anger as the recipient turned around, arms spread wide, the dust rising from his skin as it was beaten.

  “That’s Remy and Boo,” said Elspeth, “a good pair of boys, though the smell of their cooking is enough to melt your teeth. Not,” she admitted, “that I have many to call my own these days. Come from a place called the Bough in the Dominion of Circles.”