The Silent Vulcan Read online

  "I don't know!" said Malone, showing uncharacteristic irritation. "Give him a few more seconds and ask for a welfare."

  The policewoman was about to press the PPT key when Papa Golf came back, out of breath but his transmission was clear this time. "150 metres," he gasped. "Anyone going to tell me what's up?"

  Malone studied the wall map. "Get a welfare check on all units in the park and send them to position Papa Hotel to await further instructions. They're to stay well clear of location Papa Golf."

  Carol relayed Malone's instructions. Papa Hotel was the spot where his men had entered Pentworth Park the previous night. There were no reports for several minutes then:

  "Papa Tango. Objective estimated Alpha 200. Bravo 220."

  "South-East," mused Malone, much relieved. "Looks like our metal friend is heading for home."

  His surmise was borne out a few minutes later with reports from Pentworth Lake that the spyder had returned. "Looks like it had trouble maintaining Alpha as it came in," said Lima X-Ray, concluding his report. "Power sounded down and it made heavy contact in the centre of the target area."

  Meaning, it had landed with a splash, thought Malone. Should that be important? Christ knows. He was too tired to think straight.

  He kept everyone on standby until dawn was seeping into the eastern sky, when there seemed little likelihood of the spyder reappearing. He thanked everyone and stood them down, knowing that he'd have to repeat the operation the following night -- ructions permitting. Right now the only thing on his mind was sleep.

  Chapter 42.

  HARRY SHAW'S FIRST JOB IN the morning on the Pentworth Estate was to attend to the hounds. Normally the rattle of his galvanised bucket was enough to set them off -- a massed canine fury erupting into their wire-enclosed runs, joyously milling expectantly against the wire mesh, yapping for their breakfast as though he starved them. But this morning the kennel block was eerily silent. Not a hound stirred.

  With a deep sense of foreboding, he slid back the bolt, pushed the door to enter but it wouldn't budge. Something was holding it shut at the bottom. It needed a series of hard pushes with his boot to force it open as though a heavy sack was on the floor. It wasn't a sack, it was a foxhound, and it was dead.

  He pushed the corpse clear, opened the door fully, and stood surveying the terrible scene, the silence closing on his reeling mind as it sought to equate the evidence of his eyes with reality. The foxhounds were scattered everywhere, lying perfectly still. No sign of movement, not as much as flicker of eye or a twitch of a leg. Not only was the dreadful scene wrong, but the smell was wrong -- a sweet, slightly sickly smell of roast meat, and the temperature was also wrong. It was only an hour after dawn -- the sun had hardly risen -- yet it was strangely warm in the long shed. He knelt and reached out to touch the nearest corpse. It was warm, so warm that he could feel the heat radiating from the animal on the palm of his hand before it made contact with its fur. He opened the animal's eye and what he saw had him racing towards Pentworth House, screaming.

  The vet arrived an hour later. A frightened Harry Shaw showed him and Adrian Roscoe into the kennel block. The vet checked three of the hounds and didn't bother with the rest; it was obvious that all 35 animals were dead. He decided to carry out an initial on-the-spot post mortem and lifted one of the corpses onto a table. The warmth of the hound was wrong. Instead of making the usual opening incision, he made a cut deep into a muscle of a hind leg and pulled the fur and skin back to expose the muscle's tissue. In a few minutes of shocks, the colour of the striated muscle fibre was the worst of all.

  "It must have just happened before I opened up," said Harry Shaw. "They were still warm."

  "Warm?" the vet echoed. "Warm? This animal isn't just warm! It's been cooked! Take a look -- it's as though it's been cooked in a microwave oven!"

  Chapter 43.

  MALONE DROVE THE HEAVY Range Rover across the small field next to Sister Mary's cottage and stopped. A small crowd of onlookers that had gathered near the striped marker poles along the line of the Wall that cut across the field were too intent on Farside too notice his arrival. A pony-drawn gig was nearby, its side panels sign-written with `Stayin' Alive! On 87 point 5!'

  Near the gathering of mothers with young children was the lean figure of Nelson Faraday, looking resplendent in his black leather gear and cavalier boots. His cloak hid the sling and the plaster cast on his right arm. He was standing slightly away from the onlookers in the shade of a tree. Malone guessed that the black leather he favoured would be uncomfortably hot in sun.

  Malone left the vehicle, thrust his hands in his tracksuit's trouser pockets, and sauntered towards the small crowd at the Wall. The smoke rising above steep, grassy fold in the land Farside was the attraction although the crowd was considerably smaller than the previous day when it had first been seen and had aroused considerable excitement. One of his morris police officers, in his beat uniform of straw hat, white blouse, baldric, dark trousers and buckle shoes, was standing nearby, leaning on his ash staff. He straightened when he saw Malone and decided to resume his patrol. The radio reporter was Ted Savage. A Uher tape recorder was hanging from his shoulder and he was talking into a microphone. He was known to Malone and returned his wave.

  "Good afternoon, Nelson," said Malone pleasantly. "Pity we can't see down the slope. It would certainly be interesting to see what or where the smoke is coming from."

  Faraday turned and did not seem overjoyed at seeing the police officer.

  "How's the arm?" Malone inquired.

  "Healing."

  "Excellent. Try not to get the other one broken. Ah... I see you've brought your camcorder. Mr Roscoe is fortunate indeed to have you so willing to keep him supplied with home movies although I doubt if he finds them as satisfactory as the young girls you used to recruit for him in the old days."

  "Maybe you'd like to see the last scenes, Malone? Thirty-five dead foxhounds."

  "I know. I've just come from the kennels," said Malone. "A strange business."

  "Nothing strange about it. Such things will happen if you permit witches to live."

  Malone grinned broadly. "Come off it, Nelson. You don't believe that guff anymore than I do. Will you be disgracing us with your presence at the carnival tomorrow evening?"

  Faraday shrugged. "I wouldn't want to spoil your fun."

  "I would derive a good deal of pleasure from seeing you having to discourage girls from hanging onto your arm."

  Malone moved away to talk to the Radio Pentworth reporter when there was a sudden commotion in the crowd. Mothers called to their children. People were pointing. A woman screamed. None seemed to trust the Wall's invisible presence -- the entire crowd left the field in some haste with the exception of the Radio Pentworth reporter who remained gabbling excitedly into his microphone, and Nelson Faraday. "Jesus Christ," Malone muttered, too astonished to think of anything more imaginative to say.

  Faraday moved to a better position and raised the camcorder's viewfinder to his eye, working the zoom control with the fingers of his plaster encased right arm.

  A sabre tooth cat had appeared on the level, grassy stretch between the farside of the Wall and the tantalising dip.

  Chapter 44.

  "BOO!" SAID VIKKI.

  Ellen turned and nearly cut herself on the knife she was using to slice the carp. Vikki had used a kitbag strap to secure the upper half of a sabre tooth cat's skull to her head. The pair of wicked incisors hung down in front of her cheeks. It was all she was wearing apart from decorative circles she had drawn around her breasts and navel with a burnt stick. "You stupid bitch! I nearly cut my finger off!"

  "Sorry, Ellen." Vikki sat cross-legged, well away from the heat of the outside fire that Ellen had built. She wrinkled her nose at the carp. "It'll will all have gone off soon. Breakfast was definitely dodgey."

  "That's why we've got to cook and eat what's left today," said Ellen. "You must be used to fish on Fridays."

  "All that went out ye
ars ago. Mummy just gives up chocolate for Lent." Vikki fell silent, thinking about her mother always upset her. The thought that her home was only two kilometres away made matters worse. She had been up at dawn, shortly after Ellen, searching along the top of the rise in the hope of finding the gap where they had come through into Farside, and had found nothing but the yielding blackness and the continuation of the vista of an alien, windswept landscape. Home was a mere two kilometres in distance but 40,000 years in time... She brushed away a tear.

  Ellen sensed the girl's distress and changed the subject. "Where did you find that skull?"

  "Down by the river. That big pile of bones."

  "I don't suppose you thought to bring any wood back?"

  "I've been doing nothing else all morning!" Vikki protested. "Why do we have to have such a big fire? It's not as if it's cold in the daytime."

  "I like big fires," said Ellen. "We'll need enough fuel to keep it going all night."

  "What's wrong with the fire inside?"

  Ellen made no reply but concentrated on cutting large slivers of carp and laying them on stones around the fire to cook. There was just enough left for generous helpings for their lunch and evening meal. Being naked had certain disadvantages when cooking so she had draped a fur over herself. She had built the fire just before dawn after obliterating the pug marks around the hut, and had said nothing about their night visitor to Claire and Vikki.

  Claire, also naked, came out of the hut holding some torches she had been making at Ellen's behest. They were lengths of stout sapling, each with a bundle of dried moss and twigs tied around the end. She looked askance at Vikki's fearsome headgear and offered the torches for Ellen's inspection. "I've soaked the ends in the fat we found in those sausage things," she explained.

  Ellen held one of the torches in the fire. The brand burst into flame immediately. She put it out by banging it on the ground. "Excellent, Claire. We'll need at least ten."

  "You're a slave driver, Ellen."

  "Fucking hell -- Olympic torches now," Vikki declared.

  "Language," Ellen chided.

  Vikki jumped up, grinning impishly, her depression gone. "You'll be banning body language next." She grabbed one of the torches and pranced exuberantly around the fire, uttering whoops and cries, charcoal-marked breasts jiggling, golden hair flailing, the sabre toothed cat's skull askew, threatening to fall off her head. For a finale she framed her pubes with her thumbs and index fingers and performed a decidedly unladylike pelvic gyration like a nightclub lap dancer coaxing money out of a besotted punter.

  "There's no doubt that our Vikki has changed," Claire observed wryly.

  "Her mother will hold me responsible," said Ellen morosely.

  "She felt sick this morning," said Claire. "That's one thing you can't be blamed for."

  Ellen looked sharply at the young woman. "Do you really think she is pregnant?"

  "Certainly seems that way." Claire touched her stomach. "I was sick as a dog when this was a few days underway."

  "It infuriates me to think of the way the Visitors have used her," said Ellen tightly.

  "She doesn't see it that way. She insists that she was the willing partner -- her choice."

  "And what about something like 6000 people trapped inside their bloody Wall? What choice did they have?"

  Vikki flopped down before Claire had a chance to reply. She grinned at her companions. "Better not do too much of that," she said. "Might frighten off a caveman whose got me in his sights to drag me off to his cave and do unspeakable things to me."

  "I'm considering dragging you into the hut and smacking your unspeakable bottom," said Ellen severely.

  "Promises, promises," Vikki retorted.

  Claire laughed and touched the huge incisors on Vikki's headdress. "Wow. Some teeth. A sabre toothed tiger?"

  "A sabre toothed cat," Ellen corrected.

  Vikki made the skull more secure and stroked the vicious canines. "How could it eat with these things? They're way over the top."

  "They weren't so much for eating as for hunting," said Ellen. "It was a forest creature that depended on ambush as its hunting technique. It wasn't capable of the bursts of speed that a lioness is capable of on the open plains to bring down zebra or antelope. The sabre tooth would climb a tree and drop on its prey, using those canines and its incredibly powerful neck muscles to rip out its victim's spine."

  "Bloody hell," Vikki breathed. "Good job it's extinct, then."

  Ellen was about to say something when Himmler, who had been waiting for the right moment to obtain breakfast No. 4, darted forward, seized the largest and choicest piece of fish, and raced up the slope, his collar bell tinkling.

  "That sodding cat!" Ellen raged. "He's had more than all of us put together!"

  "I'll get him," said Vikki. "I rescued a fillet steak from him once." She jumped up and ran up the hill, using one of Claire's torches to speed her progress, while yelling at Himmler to stop.

  The thief reached the brow of the hill and did just that. He dropped the heavy piece of fish, hoping it would sprout legs and try to run away, while keeping one eye on Vikki climbing towards him, shouting curses. He didn't like her hat, but he liked a game and decided that this was one he couldn't lose provided he got the timing right. He let Vikki get within a few metres, snatched up his trophy, and bounded along the flat stretch.

  The snarl of a sabre-tooth cat pulled up short. The creature was crouching in Himmler's path. The siamese’s reactions were superb; without bothering to reconsider his options, his change of direction and amazing acceleration was one seamless movement. His glimpse of the beast's teeth and the distressing lack of nearby roofs or trees imbued in him a sudden strong desire to garrison the nearest horizon. He became a grey streak of southbound, panic-propelled domestic cat.

  Vikki screamed and froze.

  Ellen and Claire saw the sabre toothed cat at the same instant. It was within five metres of Vikki and seemed to be preparing to spring, wriggling its haunches to tuck its hind legs closer together.

  "Vikki!" Ellen screamed. "Don't move! For Christ's sake keep still!" With that Ellen was racing up the slope towards the big cat with Claire following.

  Vikki was incapable of moving. All she could manage were great sobs of terror as she stared into the malevolent yellow eyes. Serendipity played a vital part by paralyzing her muscles so that her grip on the torch never slackened.

  The sabre tooth cat was undecided. Her hunger was a ravening torment but she had encountered these strange, upright, two-legged beings before. They had one arm longer than the other and were dangerous. They had killed her mate and her nearly fully grown cub a long time ago but the memory hadn't faded with time. Two more were coming up the hill towards her, not running away like most prey -- although she was now too old and stiff to catch even slow-moving animals. Her last meal, an injured bird, had hardly assuaged her gnawing hunger whereas the overpowering warm blood scent of this puny creature promised a feast. The heady smell was a compulsive clamour that caused threads of saliva to hang from her mighty incisors that had killed so many, so effortlessly, when she was young. But caution prevailed and she hesitated, expressing her rage and frustration by snarling at this blinding temptation standing shock still before her.

  Ellen slipped on loose stones. She snatched up two large, round rocks and kept climbing. She reached the brow of the rise and rushed straight at the sabre tooth cat. Her first rock missed, but the second hit the big cat painfully on the nose. That decided it. With a final enraged snarl of angry defeat, it turned and fled downhill, the steep slope giving it an impetus that her arthritic joints would not otherwise permit.

  Chapter 45.

  MALONE WAS STANDING NOT 20 metres away and had witnessed every detail of the extraordinary incident. For once his clinical rationality deserted him and he started forward, only to encounter the benign resistance of the Wall. The blackness cleared and he stood staring at the three tearfully embracing women. The image of Ellen rushing at
that hellish creature, that lovely black hair and that beautiful, naked, voluptuous body that had writhed under him on a memorable hot afternoon, played over and over in his mind with a vividness that ceased when the three women, sobbing with relief and still clinging to each other, disappeared from sight.

  "So we now know what the smoke is coming from," said a voice at his side. Malone turned to confront Faraday. He was holding his camcorder with his good arm like a talisman, his smile mocking. "A cauldron, no doubt. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Should be some interesting footage. Or is it metres these days?"

  The thought of this dreg and Roscoe drooling over a video tape of Ellen was intolerable but Malone contained his anger, keeping his voice calm. "I would like that tape please, Faraday."

  "Really, Mr Malone? And which one of those three lovely ladies is your favourite? Claire Lake? I've had that little one more times than I can remember. Passable, I suppose. Vikki Taylor? She gave me a hard time; a prissy little virgin but she didn't look it just now, did she? A skull on her head, pagan runes on her body, naked. Quite the wild little witch's acolyte." Faraday's smug grin was of someone who knows that he has the upper hand. "Or is your preference for older woman such as Ellen Duncan? If so, I admire your taste. A splendid animal. There's something excitingly primitive about her."

  "The tape," said Malone evenly. "Or do you want your other arm broken?"

  Faraday lowered the camcorder and gave the radio reporter a pained glance. "Uttering threats, Mr Malone? In front of a witness?"

  "A witness would add piquancy to the pleasure I would derive from hearing your other arm snap like a rotten twig. It won't be clean break. It will be a horribly messy greenstick fracture that will take months to heal properly, if ever."

  The two men regarded each other for several seconds. The radio reporter sensed trouble brewing and sneaked his microphone between two protagonists. Faraday shrugged and fiddled to get the camcorder open -- a task hardly made easy by his cloak and a plaster cast on his arm. He handed a video cassette to the police officer.