The sky is almost dark by the time I reach the two vehicles. The Rav4 stands empty like a ruin. I sit in my own vehicle and try to call HQ to report the missing people. But once again I get no proper signal, no voices other than my own to trouble the darkness. I keep trying but nobody responds. After a while, I return to the Toyota. The camera is still on the seat where I left it, the tape stopped in exactly the same place. I press play and watch the blue screen, trying to see beyond it to what’s on the other side. I let it run for a minute but it’s a waste of time. Just as I’m about to stop it, the blue turns to white, which slowly reconfigures into a honeycombed pattern which moves back and forth across the frame. In quick succession three shots ring out on the tape, the first sounds since Teakettle Junction. I am calm, I don’t feel any fear, not until another minute has passed and a fourth blast sounds out and the screen fades to black.
Outside, I peer into the dark and see the more intense darkness of the Grandstand looming up out of the Racetrack. It’s no closer than it was before, I tell myself, though I no longer feel any inclination to trust my perceptions. An hour has passed when I climb back into the Expedition. Nobody has come. This time, when I call HQ, I do finally get something, a voice reporting an abandoned SUV out at the Racetrack. I shut the power off quickly, drink more water and try not to imagine the rocks gathering out on the playa. I think about the voice I heard and what it was saying. Speaking only to myself I respond, “You won’t find anything out there.” And after a minute’s silence I add, “They’re gone.” Hearing something, I get out of the car. I walk to the side of the road, feeling the weight of the night as it falls on the Valley. I can’t see anything but I look anyway, knowing that the rocks are edging their way up from the south. I tell myself someone must have heard them, that someone will come. These are the certainties that sustain me. I can’t stop myself from listening so when they stop it comes as a shock. Then, before I can register it, they start moving again, heading west, towards the road. I have no strength left. I sit down in the dirt to wait for someone to arrive even though I already know that nobody is coming here, that no one else belongs. The truth is I have as much right to be here as the dark. It’s reason that’s out of place here, that doesn’t belong. Reason can’t explain the rocks that roll, the moans of night or the flakes of sky that drift quietly down to Earth, which, given time, I probably could.
Simon Clark & Tim Lebbon
Exorcizing Angels
Simon Clark’s most recent books include Vampyrrhic Rites, In This Skin, Stranger and The Night of the Triffids (winner of the British Fantasy Award). His fiction has also been published in newspapers and broadcast on talk radio.
Tim Lebbon’s books include the novels Face, The Nature of Balance, Mesmer, Until She Sleeps, Dusk, Desolation and Into the Wild Green Yonder (with Peter Crowther), plus the novellas Naming of Parts, White, Changing of Faces and Dead Man’s Hand. His short fiction has been collected in As the Sun Goes Down, White and Other Tales of Ruin and Fears Unnamed. He has won two British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and his work (including the novella that follows) has been optioned for the screen on both sides of the Atlantic.
While Clark readily acknowledges that war is a terrible thing, he reveals: “If the First World War hadn’t happened I wouldn’t be here, nor would the events have occurred that inspired this story. My grandmother was engaged to a young soldier who was killed in the trenches in France. About the time of that soldier’s death the Welsh writer Arthur Machen wrote a story, ‘The Bowmen’, which sparked an astonishing episode of public hysteria rivalled only by Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds a couple of decades later.
“I found the events surrounding Machen’s story fascinating, and when I was talking to Tim Lebbon I realized that I’d found a like mind and fellow Machen fan.”
“I’m fascinated by the ever-shifting boundaries between truth and fiction,” adds Lebbon, “and how they are often blurred, whether by events or by the perception of those viewing them. In the case of ‘The Bowmen’ a simple story was transformed into a great myth that enveloped a generation, and which still endures today.”
“We both agreed that we must collaborate on a story that centred somehow on Machen and his tale that inspired the legend of ‘The Angels of Mons’,” continues Clark. “At last we did, and this is the result. A story about a story that just might have turned the tide of the Great War, which in turn shaped the world we live in today.”
“Simon and I had been working on this story in various forms for a few years,” Lebbon reveals, “and the invitation to collaborate on a book for Earthling Publications made it a reality. And being writers, perpetuating that ambiguous link between belief and disbelief, truth and fiction, was a natural part of our job.”
This is the Blitz: the relentless aerial bombardment of London by German aircraft since July. Hundreds of tons of bombs, thousands of incendiaries and countless parachute mines have laid waste to whole tracts of the capital, destroyed factories, homes and our places of worship alike. So far, Hitler’s war machine has killed more than twenty thousand men, women and children. Tonight, this December 17 1940, special services are to be held in churches across the whole of Great Britain. Our prayers will be in remembrance of those innocent victims of war and a plea to the Heavenly Father for divine protection against these Swastika’d angels of Death.
THE CITY took the hammer blows with the fortitude only a 2,000-year-old city can. On the walk up here to the London district of Highgate he’d heard a taxi driver call out to a policeman, “It’s a bit lively out tonight.” It was gallows humour, and he recognized it well.
The man chose to walk in the centre of the road. There was little traffic, and virtually no people were about. They were all snugged away in cellars and shelters on this September night, no doubt praying that the death raining down from hundreds of German bombers fell on someone else’s street, someone else’s house.
He pulled up the collar of his army greatcoat as the cold air caressed his skin like the chill fingers of a dead man. From here, the sound of the bombs came as strangely soft thuds that reminded him of books falling to a library floor. Through the midnight air he caught the scent of ancient roof timbers burning from the direction of Bloomsbury. Once, hot air belched against his face from a stray incendiary blazing in a nearby garden.
The street, like the rest of Britain, was subject to total blackout. In front of him was a fog of darkness through which he caught the glints of windows, shining like so many demon eyes, glaring at him, expecting a Nazi bomb to tear him to pieces at a moment’s notice. But two decades ago he had walked through worse firestorms than these. And tonight he had the most important appointment of his life. Hitler and his henchmen would not deflect him.