Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 36

"Is that some of her work?" she asked, looking past me.

I turned to look at the paintings hanging in the hall. They'd been there for so long now that I had stopped noticing them. "Yes."

Pauline stepped into the hallway and walked along the wall looking at Karen's paintings of elves and goblins and fairy-folk.

"She did them for Julie Dunmow's books," I explained. "You know, The King of the Elves. The Tale of Ynessil and Awen."

"I know," she said, leaning close to one of the paintings. "My nephew's got all her books. I didn't realise your wife did the ill.u.s.trations."

"Good little earner," I said. "We're still getting royalties."

"Mm." She pointed to one of the pictures. "This looks like those things we saw yesterday. At the farm."

I went over and stood beside her. She was looking at Karen's painting of the King of the Goblins, carousing with his mates in his castle. Now she mentioned it, the goblins did look a little like the creatures from Derek Wood's farm. "I suppose," I said.

She moved on to the next painting, of a stick-thin, inhumanly-beautiful fairy, its gossamer wings spread as it ascended into a moonlit sky. "This is lovely," she murmured.

"It's the last painting she ever did," I said.

"Oh." She suddenly looked awkward. "I'm sorry, I-"

"It's all right." I walked past her and opened the living room door. "Someone to see you," I told Karen.

I had a private theory that Seldon was being punished for having ducked down below the parapet of History throughout its entire existance. Almost seven hundred years of English history had simply pa.s.sed the villageby. None of its sons had gone to war, none of its inhabitants had written books or painted portraits or become an architect or a disc-jockey or a world-famous fashion designer. Seldon had started out as a village of ordinary people, and it had stayed that way.

General Branch appeared to be an anomaly, but it transpired that he hadn't been a local boy. On his death in battle the Duke of Marlborough had decreed that his General be buried in the little cemetary at St Luke's.

n.o.body knew why. Even General Branch seemed bemused, and not a little annoyed at being confined within the boundaries of the church grounds.

Seldon was cursed. That was the only explanation that made any sense to me.

Ever since the beginning of July, the village had experienced corn circles, spontaneous combustions, visions of unknown cities floating in the sky, UFOs, falls of frogs and anchovies, alien abductions, metal plaques etched in unknown languages dug up in fields, livestock mutilations, mysterious detonations echoing across the sky, homunculi, succubi and incubi. A Wild Hunt had been observed riding through Hobbes'

Wood, and there were so many Green Men that the journalists had stopped reporting them.

And the Dead walked the Earth. Or rather, one of them appeared on Breakfast Television, and the other sat in the corner of my living room watching Can't Cook, Won't Cook.

I carried a bottle of Budweiser to the bottom of the garden and sat on the little rustic bench that looked as if it had been slowly rotting away for the past three hundred years. I drank some beer and looked about me.

It was a nice garden. Not too big, not too cramped. Square lawn in the middle, flower-beds up two sides, a line of horse chestnuts along the bottom with some rhododendrons thrown in for a bit of colour. A couple of yards away, sitting in the shade of one of the rhododendron bushes, was a wood-sprite.

I searched the path around my feet, found a bit of bark amongst the gravel, picked it up and waved it half-heartedly at the sprite.

It came out from under the bush, about a foot tall, a pointy, twiggy little thing with tiny scary black eyes under enormous beetling brows. It approached me with nervous scratching noises on the gravel, watching my face all the time, until it was close enough to reach out and grab the bit of bark and scuttle back to the safety of the bushes, where it squatted gnawing on the t.i.tbit. Another one came out of the shadows and they started to squabble over the bit of wood.

Somebody on television had coined the term "discrete phenomena" to describe what was happening in Seldon. They hadn't been here, or they would have realised that some phenomena were a whole lot less discrete than others. The village was infested with wood-sprites; they had crowded the squirrels out of their ecological niche. Springheel Jack was everywhere. Corn circles appeared wherever there was a crop tall enough to take a mark, whether it was a corn field or a neglected gra.s.s verge. Every evening, around seven, dozens of lights appeared in the sky and started to zoom about exhibiting nonballistic flight previously unseen outside Close Encounters. The Americans called it the Evening Show, and some of them still went up to Sefton Hill to shoot fresh footage.

On the other hand, there were only two ghosts, and Elvis had limited himself to one manifestation so far, buying an inflatible mattress at Argos. Sonia Gregory, who worked on the checkout, had testified that the King had appeared to date from the later Vegas Years but had been a perfect Southern gentleman.

The sprites stopped fighting and froze, looking past me towards the house. I looked around. Pauline was walking up the path towards me. I heard a sudden scrabbling noise, and when I looked again the sprites had gone.

Pauline sat down next to me on the bench and looked at the flower-beds on the other side of the lawn.

She clasped her hands in her lap and sighed.

"Rosemary," I said.

She seemed to wake up all of a sudden. "Pardon?"

"Over there," I said, pointing to the little bush Karen had planted the week we moved in. "Rosemary."

She looked at me as if I was a dog that had started to recite a McGonnagal poem.

"Nothing like a sprig of fresh rosemary on a lamb chop," I told her. "Dried rosemary isn't the same."

She looked at the bush, and for a moment I thought she might have been half-convinced about the lamb chop. Then she said, "How do you cope?"

"Oh." I thought about it. "I get along." I shrugged. "I suppose."

"She wouldn't tell me what happened."

"Well." I scratched my head. "She was allergic to wasp stings, but she didn't know that until she was stung by a wasp." I looked about us. "A little over a year ago. Right here, as it happens."

She was watching my face.

"She managed to get to the phone in the living room, but she pa.s.sed out before she could dial 999. She still had the phone in her hand when I came home for lunch and found her lying there."

"Oh." She sighed again. Then she said, "That's a really stupid way to die, isn't it."

"I suppose so." I rummaged in my pockets and found the Cafe Creme Harvey had given me the day before. "Do you have a light?" "I don't smoke."

I put the cigar back in my pocket. "So. Did you get what you wanted?"

She was quiet for a moment, frowning at the rosemary bush. "It's just so... sad." She shook her head.

"How did you feel? When she came back?"

"She hasn't come back," I said. I stood up. "Shall we go for a walk?"

"Yes," she said. "Let's."

Our street was a cul-de-sac, its top end blocked by the houses occupied since the time of the Treaty of Versailles by the Prentice Sisters, a pair of alarming nonagenarian spinsters who went shopping two abreast, towing their shopping trolleys behind them and bowling oncoming pedestrians into the road. A privet-lined path ran along the side of Sarah Prentice's house and back garden, then angled sharply off and opened up into a vista of fields and little copses.

We turned right at the end of the path and walked away from the village. Over in the distance, I could see the bright lights of a television crew vox-popping yet another villager. Not far from them, a group of figures was moving in what seemed to be a slow purposeful dance: crop-circle people, measuring and recording.

"What did you mean about Karen not coming back?" Pauline asked.

I stood and watched the crop-circle people. "General Branch has come back, even if he can't leave St Luke's churchyard. I've had to settle for a disembodied voice. I don't call that coming back."

"Does that make you angry?"

I looked down at her. "Are you recording this?"

She was quiet for a few moments. Then she put a hand in one of her jacket pockets. I heard the faint click of a tape recorder being switched off. "Has anybody had any ideas why Karen and the General can't leave the place they reappeared in?"

"Everyone has a theory."

"Do you?"

I shrugged. Over in a copse I saw sunlight flash on the banked lenses of dozens of remote-controlled cameras.

"Did you know you're on the Internet?" Pauline asked, seeing me looking at the cameras.

"I prefer to think of the Internet as something that happens to other people," I said in what I thought was a suitably stoic tone of voice.

She waved a hand to encompa.s.s the village and its environs and all the lunatics enclosed within. "It all winds up there in the end. Print journalism, still photos, full-motion video, hours of recorded interviews.

Thousands and thousands of pages and newsgroups and discussion rooms. There are fifty dedicated WebCams installed in Seldon and the fields, beaming back pictures twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, hoping to catch some phenomenon going on. This place is the Mecca of the X-Files generation. The only reason the Loch Ness Monster hasn't turned up here is that you haven't got a big enough pond."

I stopped and looked down at her. She sounded angry, and I found that interesting. I'd met all kinds of people since Seldon had been cursed. I had met greedy people who wanted to exploit us. I had met wide-eyed idealists. I had met people who wanted to come and see things they had only heard of in old stories. I had never met anyone who was just angry.

"Has something upset you?" I asked.

She looked at me for a few moments. "I've just spent half an hour interviewing your late wife, and you have to ask me if something's upset me?"

"Oh," I said, putting my hands in my pockets and walking off again. "Right."

We drifted, two figures lost in a humming-hot landscape of low hills and fields and copses. We drifted so far that we didn't see a reporter or a news team for minutes at a time.

At one point, we climbed a stile between two fields and were confronted by a young woman dressed as a Druid, standing like a statue in her robes and looking, now we were out of sight of human habitation, a little alarming.

Pauline wasn't alarmed. "Go home!" she yelled at the Druid.

The Druid raised an eyebrow.

"Go away!" Pauline shouted, waving her arms.

The Druid-or more properly Druidess, I suppose-leaned on her staff with a certain dignity I envied, and gazed off into some presumably mystical distance. Pauline shook her head and stomped off in the opposite direction.

It took me a few moments to catch up with her. She wasn't very tall, but she could stomp along at an impressive speed.

"I didn't want this a.s.signment, you know," she said.

"You hide it very well." "I really begged my editor. Any day now the jury's going to be coming back with a verdict in that big murder trial in Salisbury. I could have been covering that."

I nodded in what I hoped was an understanding manner, though I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. I didn't read the papers much any more, and Karen didn't like to watch the news on the television.

"Oh no," she muttered, kicking at the ground. "Oh no, I had to come here along with the rest of the world's f.u.c.king Press and write stories about ghosties and ghoulies." She glanced up at me and her expression changed suddenly. "Oh, Geoff. I'm sorry. I didn't-"

"It's all right," I said. "I keep expecting people to get bored with it all and go away."

She shook her head. "This is the Silly Season, Geoff. Parliament's on holiday, there's no football, Wimbledon's over, the weather's not doing anything much, half the population's in Benidorm. People just lap this stuff up."

A few hundred yards away, some more crop-circle people were wandering about with their tape measures and video cameras and theodolites.

"Out of interest, why did you get those students to make that crop circle?" I asked.

She snorted. "That was another of my editor's bright ideas. She thought I could make a story out of how gullible people are, so she told me to fake up a crop circle and see how many people believed it was genuine."

I thought about it. "I think that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard," I said.

"My editor's not exactly the shiniest tool in the box." She looked out into the distance and shaded her eyes with her hand. "I don't know, maybe she's right. There's no original angle on this thing any more.

n.o.body knows why it's happening. All they can do is stand and watch."

"One of the scientists says it's being caused by El Nino," I said.

She snorted. "If all else fails, blame the weather. n.o.body knows, Geoff. It's the perfect phenomenon for the new millennium. Pointless, senseless and inexplicable, with great photo opportunities."

"You must have some pretty good material now, though," I said. "What with that business at Derek's farm yesterday. And talking to Karen. Doesn't that give you an original angle?"

She lowered her hand and looked at me. "Do you want to hear what she said?"

"No, thank you." I turned and walked away.

"Why not?" she shouted.

5.

A couple of days later, I was sitting in the office looking at the accounts when I heard a Range Rover pulled up outside. Domino was taking his turn at the pumps, so I just scowled at the ledger on the desk in front of me and drank some coffee.

"That has to be the saddest sight in the world," said Harvey.

I looked up from the books. "What's that?"

"A good man trying to rescue his business, that's what."

I looked around the office. "Did a good man come in here?"

Despite the temperature, Harvey was wearing what he called his 'local camouflage': tan cord trousers, green cord waistcoat, woollen shirt, knitted tie, tan cord jacket, green wellies and a flat cap. I never saw a man who looked further from home.

"Pauline says you had a row."