From this landscape and palette they derived a mood, a sense of foreboding and intrusion. The theme was never being safe, and above all never being safe in isolation. In these stories, the boy said, if you wanted to be the hero you had to stand alone, but when you were alone was also when you might get eaten by the monster.
‘First it is seen,’ the boy explained, waving his hands at the edge of his vision, ‘here. And then there are more and more warnings, and they are ignored. Always, in daylight, the warnings are funny. They come from someone a little silly, maybe. And finally it walks in the night and everything is terrible.’
The interesting thing, to the Sergeant, was how these stories were at least in one way quite true to life: you didn’t know whether you were the hero or not until the end, because at any time up to that moment you could just get eaten and the rest would be about someone else. In fact you were never safe, because sometimes the monsters won.
From patches and scraps they stitched a skittering cockroach blanket and left it out for Mancreu to find.
The following morning, the fourth since Shola’s death, the Sergeant carefully assembled his face and manner into an attitude of amiable vagueness. It was difficult, requiring constant attention. If his focus wandered, his shoulders tightened and his mouth slipped into the sneer he recognised from the first day of deployment to an active theatre. But it was necessary for what came next that he should appear benign to the point of risible, so he thought about what Shola would say to this new plan, and played his part.
‘You’re quite out of your mind, Lester, you know that?’
‘Yes, Shola, I do.’
‘I mean, seriously, my friend: this is a terrible idea.’
‘So you like it.’
‘I love it. But that does not make it smart.’
‘You want to come?’
‘I’ll watch from a safe distance, I think. But you go ahead and have fun. Give Marie a hug for me, Lester. She’s not doing well.’
But that was too close to home, and he hurriedly put the vision away, then composed a hazy smile and ambled through the streets of Beauville with his customary pleasantness. He greeted the people and gossiped, accepted their condolences and their respect, and took his ease. Wherever he went he allowed the conversation to follow its own course, to wind and meander. That sort of chatter, on Mancreu, inevitably tended to swapping gossip and rumour, and where it seemed appropriate he would laugh and mention the demon, just in passing. Then – if someone asked ‘What demon?’ which they mostly did – he would explain and laugh some more. If he laughed too hard, well, he was a man who had lost a friend, and he could be allowed to find humour where he might. If it didn’t come up, then, well, that was fine too.
He told farmers he’d heard the story from stevedores, drovers he had it from seamstresses, bakers it came from lobstermen. Always he dismissed it out of hand, even as he spiced the pot with alarming details: the hint of missing persons, the flavour of doubt and poorly concealed official concern. He sought reassurances: ‘Oh, so you have seen Old Père Lipton? Good, all right, then he’s fine,’ as if crossing a potential victim off a list in his head. When pressed, he would explain that there were concerns about a real monster behind the story, a ghoul in the night. He didn’t outright say that it might be a human being so warped by the Discharge Clouds that he had become something other. He let the notion bubble up. He was jaunty, and called the whole thing a ghost story, nothing worth thinking about. And then in parting he would drop a reference to someone who was still missing. Every so often he sealed the deal with an earnest ‘There’s really no cause for alarm.’
It was so easy, he felt a little ashamed. You could have done it anywhere, in any village in the world. At a pub near Hereford, he remembered, an earnest matron had told him in great seriousness that windmills caused cancer, and the government was covering it up. A man from the Spectator, she said, had come and given a lecture. When the Sergeant had begun to express doubt, the whole saloon bar had laughed at him for his credulity. Myths and monsters were a human weakness, even in places not about to be evacuated and sterilised by fire.
The boy meanwhile had let the story slip to the card-players, who inevitably handed it on to passers-by and friends, and the legend grew in the telling so that one lonely ghost became a host led by an appalling demon prince. Inoue was right, apparently: the mountain people, in particular, had a lot of demons – although the fishermen had more than enough to be going on with, rising up from the frozen deep-water hell.
The boy had moved on to the waterfront and idled with the net-menders and the basket-weavers, run errands for the Portmaster. If he mentioned along his way the matter of the disappearances, the ones NatProMan was covering up, well, he could hardly be blamed. He was a child, and, after all, everyone was talking about it.
This being the way of things, it was quite natural for the Sergeant to bump into Pechorin, pass him a routine report from Kershaw’s office, and share the local colour.
‘Watch out for the demon!’ he said as he was leaving, and Pechorin grinned.
‘Sure, Lester. I will be very careful. I would not want Baba Yaga to come and steal my balls. Unless it is young Baba Yaga. A beautiful demon would be okay.’ He made a helpful gesture with his hips for clarification.
‘Well, I can’t help you there,’ the Sergeant said genially. ‘We’re pretty certain it’s a man.’
‘Fuck!’ Pechorin cried in appalled delight. ‘You taking this seriously? There is a demon?’
‘Oh, yes. Of course. Well, not like a real demon sort of demon, obviously. Just someone not right in the head. Or a man suffering some sort of break because of… everything. There’s no serious suggestion that he’s been affected by the Clouds. Yeah,’ he mused, almost to himself, ‘there’s a few Leavers have been a bit mad, we tend to brush them under the carpet, sort them out at the other end. And there was one lad with longish fingernails and teeth, but he was from the mountains and you couldn’t say for sure he wasn’t always like that. Anyway, nothing to worry about for an armed patrol. Less good by yourself in a dark corner, I suppose, if he’s really far gone. I mean, you know what crazy people are.’ He sucked air through his teeth, as if this thought was just now occurring to him.
The merriment faded. Pechorin’s mother was from Rostov, at one time the home of Eastern Europe’s most infamous murderer. A grubby little man in a brown overcoat had killed nearly a hundred people, and ever since his execution by firing squad the town had had a ridiculously high rate of serial murderers, as if Chikatilo’s spirit had passed into the air. Perhaps it had; the arresting officer had been suspicious because of a smell he detected around the suspect, a smell he called simply ‘evil’ but which forensics later explained as the meaty exhalation of a cannibal.
Pechorin’s crew muttered and crossed themselves. It was an irritation to the Sergeant that men who one moment before had been braying for the sexual favours of a fiend could appeal to the Virgin in the next. It smacked of sloppy thinking.
‘He’s killed men?’ Pechorin demanded. ‘Women?’
The Sergeant raised his hands resignedly. ‘People are missing. But people are always missing on Mancreu. They drown. They fall off cliffs. Or they Leave and don’t tell anyone. It’s not serious. Only…’ He let his voice trail off as if in thought, then shook his head to clear it. ‘Never mind. But if you see anything, let me know.’