Dogfighters: Under the Hill Read online

  Still something flickered, just out of sight. He stepped back, and there it was—in every droplet of water that ran down the windows was a face, and every face the same, all of them vainly mouthing soundless phrases at him.

  “Geoff?”

  But it wasn’t Geoff. He grabbed a soup bowl from the draining rack, wrestled with the back door and ran out into the deluge, holding out the bowl and catching the falling water. All the faces ran into one as he did so, and candlelight wavered up from the bowl and spilled over his hands.

  He could see the face much clearer now—round, earnest, flawless, with plump pink lips like flower petals and milky, ancient eyes. At the same time, he knew he had been seen—the creature stopped talking, lowered the hood from around his head and showed hair brown as good soil, and on it a circlet shaped like a two-headed serpent. When he shook his wrists free of the cloak, they too were gauntleted to the elbow with golden snakes.

  A badge of office of some kind, Chris thought. He expects me to recognise what he is. But he didn’t know the secret handshake, so he forced himself to smile.

  It seemed to do the trick. The monk or priest or whatever he was, unrolled a scroll and held it out for Chris to read. In beautiful calligraphy, around which someone had clearly spent hours drawing and painting small birds, it said, He says you must be told there is an invasion coming. He has seen the troops himself, arrayed for battle and awaiting the command.

  Oh shit. Chris stopped admiring the scroll, bit down on the automatic protest, the cry of Fucking hell! What do you expect me to do about it? That he knew was just the helpless anger born out of fear.

  He does not know when nor where they will come. But so that you may know it is he who sends these words, he bids you remember Doncaster.

  Geoff! Geoff was the only one in any world who could have sent that message. Chris patted himself down frantically but came up empty handed. No pen or paper. He dashed back inside, found the pad by the phone and wrote Where is he? Is he okay? Ran back out and found only a bowl full of rain, cold and grey. He flung it at the wall, felt no better when it smashed and the shards disappeared into the tangle of undergrowth.

  Back to the kettle. He made himself a cup of tea, drank it, got the panic back under its cap and welded it as tight as he could manage. Still felt a little sick but that could be borne. The important thing was to take appropriate action, and getting into Faerie had never looked more vital. Back to the plan, then, just with a higher degree of urgency.

  A place of power, hey? A physical reminder of his will, something with which he could change the world? Oh yes, there once had been something of that kind. Half an hour’s googling pulled out the information that there still was, away on the other side of the Peaks. In Langdale, the Museum of Aviation History housed one of the only complete Mosquitoes left. They were working on it even now, trying to restore it to join the Battle of Britain flight. The Andrews Sisters warbled tinnily out of his computer speakers as he read, provoking a rush of calm as the learned habits of wartime reasserted themselves.

  The website which claimed that the plane was nearly complete was itself a year old and had not been updated in all that time. He leaned back in his seat and looked at the picture. There wasn’t a plane like it. The Spitfire boys got all the glory, but he doubted if there was anyone left on the planet who could do what he could do with a bombed-up Mosquito.

  He wrote down the phone number on a pad of paper, looked for the house phone, which he seemed to have left somewhere again. Bloody hell. By now it would probably have gone flat and need recharging before use. Why they didn’t keep them attached to cords any more, he didn’t know. At least you didn’t wander off with the receiver and lose it somewhere when it was screwed to the wall.

  Taking his mobile from his trouser pocket, he switched it back on. Two messages, just in the short time he’d been incommunicado. He turned down the computer speaker with a huff of annoyance and played the first one. Stan’s number and Stan’s father saying, “I want a word with you, Mr. Gatrell. Don’t try pretending you haven’t got this message. I’ll know when you pick it up, so don’t try weaselling out of it.”

  Extraordinary. He phoned Stan’s number at once and shifted in his seat as suppressed anger made his spine itch. He really did not have time for this today.

  “Hello, Fred Grimshore here. Who’s that?”

  “Mr. Gatrell. You asked me to call.”

  The voice on the other end deepened almost a full octave into a growl. “Oh, it’s you, is it?”

  “Of course it is. You asked me to call. What is this…”

  “Why the fuck did you give my boy fifty quid?”

  Chris’s mind was still a long way away, in the 1940s. He didn’t immediately see what was so wrong in helping a boy to develop his talent and in paying him a fair price for the components and labour he had put in on a project that benefited them both. “He’s been doing some work for me,” he said, unsettled by the man’s attitude. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “What kind of work?”

  “It’s complicated.” Chris shrugged, noticed that his tea had gone cold and that the second message was from Ben. How was Ben, anyway, this first day back at work? Perhaps he should have checked? “Some…er…image processing.”

  “You what?” The growl roughened. Malice could practically be seen, dripping off the sliver finish of the phone onto the floor, shimmering over it like a haze. Unprepared, Chris felt the hostility like a blow to the chest. “Pictures? What kind of pictures?”

  He had a suspicion that the truth might not go down well, but what else was there? “Ghosts, mostly. Some elves, but they’re tricky—don’t come out well on any kind of film.”

  “You fucking loony! Listen, I heard from our Karen at the Red Lion you’d started seeing things. Acting crazy. So I ask my son what he does with your lot and he looks shifty, and I find he’s got fifty quid from you stashed under the bed. You get my drift? So I’ll tell you what’s going to happen now. You get lost. You never talk to him again, you never come round here ever again. ’Cause if you do, I’ll fucking murder you, and I’m not kidding. I’ve got a spade and a patch in the garden marked out for you. All right?”

  “It most certainly is not—” The phone cut off. “All right,” Chris finished, watching sparkly stars dance on the computer screen, advertising online poker. A chance to lose money without all this recrimination. He swallowed, something in his belly tying itself up in a knot. What on earth was that about? Sometimes he thought it was the entire world that had gone mad, not him at all. Bloody man, no wonder Stan was shy and something of a sneak, living with a father who reacted like that to a friendly stranger offering encouragement.

  He called up Google maps and worked out how long it would take to drive to Langdale. A little over two hours. Not bad at all. Maybe he’d do it now, offer a knowledgeable eye or a test pilot’s experience. The threat of invasion surely trumped any other priorities he might have.

  But the message from Ben remained unanswered. He watched the phone for a moment, trying to guess whether it would be good or bad news, and a little warmth stirred just under his breastbone and untangled some of his anger and anxiety. He realised he was holding the message in the palm of his hand for all the world as if it too were a sacrament, a talisman. But it wasn’t. It was only a phone call.

  He hit Listen, anticipating the sound of Ben’s voice, the irreverent and glorious strength of it. The boy would have made a good flight engineer. Always calm, always thinking ahead. He knew how not to show fear, even when it was eating him up. He’d have done all right in a Lanc.

  Chris was caught with a smile on his face when the first words tumbled out. “Fuck you! Damn you to hell, Chris. What the fuck are you doing? Oh please!” The saw of terrified breathing mixed with sobs.

  “There was a thing at the office. It was going for a… It was going for a customer. I had to use the vial—the water—to get rid of it. I thought I’d run to the Red Lion, but now I d
on’t know where I am. There’s nothing outside the car. It’s all just white. I’m s-scared, Chris. I don’t know what to do. Shit! There’s something out there.”

  Chris was already out of the front door, scrabbling in his pocket for his keys. They snagged on the inside of his pocket, tore, and Ben said, “Chris! Chris, where the fucking hell are you?”

  “Hey, hey.” He got the car door open, the key in the ignition. “It’s all right, just hold on, I’m coming. I’ll be there in no time. Where are you?”

  “You promised not to let this happen to me. You promised!”

  Chris looked helplessly at the phone. For a moment he’d forgotten it was just a recording, half an hour old. Whatever was going to happen had already happened, and despite his fine words, he had not been there. He’d been looking up old planes on the internet and thinking of Geoff.

  “Help me.” Ben’s words were all but indistinguishable beneath the choke of tears and terror. “No. Chris. Help me! Help me. No!”

  A rending noise, like a falling wall—like a steel door being torn down—and then a click. Silence. Chris thought for a moment he could hear something residual on the line, realised it was his own speeding breath. He felt nauseous with adrenaline, and his hands shook so much he dropped the phone into the footwell as he tried to put it away.

  Where had they taken Ben? More to the point, where had they taken him from? Wherever the walls of the world had been punctured, a weakness would be left for up to three days. Other things—such as himself—might sneak through and back.

  Lost between the bank and the pub. But he couldn’t have been snatched from the car between those two places without causing chaos. He’d been pixie-led—guided inexorably to a spot of their choice and… The thought leapt up like an inspiration. They’d come through at Ben’s house, seen him there first. His body would find it easy to take him there on autopilot while his mind was magic-mazed.

  Very well. Try the house. Chris drove to Ben’s work place and retraced the route he would have taken home, just to double check. No traffic jams, no upturned vehicles laced with claw marks. None of those goose-walking-over-one’s-grave moments that Chris had learned to associate with a breakdown of the normal fibre of the world.

  Ben’s car was not in his drive. But could they have taken it while Ben dived out at the last moment and made a run for it? That too had got to be worth checking. Chris turned in and ruffled the immaculate gravel. The bell sounded shrill to him, the knocker portentous, but that was just nerves. He waited three minutes, knocked again and shouted while panic made blue lights fire up and down his spine, shrivelled his lungs in liquid nitrogen. “Ben? Are you in there?”

  Pressing his ear to the glass brought sound, voices. It might not be too late after all! He tore around the back of the house, unclasped his pocket knife and cut through the plastic sheeting, sidled through into a blue-lit, cathedral-type space where the sitting room existed, half in, half outside. A liminal zone—they would like that, twilight creatures that they were.

  The voices were louder here. The padlocked door stood between Chris and them, a man’s voice and a woman’s, raised in argument. He couldn’t tell, with the muffled effect of the wood, if the man’s voice was Ben’s. “Ben? Is that you?”

  They carried on as if they hadn’t heard him while he looked around for something with which to force the door. The little black eye of a security camera gazed at him impassively as he returned from the garden with the pedestal of the birdbath under his arm. One blow of that, used as a battering ram to the padlock, and then another. The door boomed and splintered. The hasp of the lock stretched like rubber and snapped, and he ran inside still carrying the garden ornament, half-weapon, half-forgotten under his arm.

  Empty rooms, freshly hoovered. He set the stone column down and brought out his knife again, turned the handle of the kitchen noiselessly. Edged it slowly, carefully open. A flood of sunlight glittering on spilled rain, tinted pink from the roses around the window. Countertops sparkled, and the Radio Four afternoon play spilled out remorselessly from a radio plugged into a timer on the wall. Security conscious Ben had set it to play in his absence, to fool the burglars into thinking he was at home.

  Chris snapped it off, put the knife down on the countertop and staggered back to the table, sitting down while the battle readiness ebbed and left the shakes behind it.

  Like amber and garnet in the sunlight, bottles of spirits lined one counter, cut-glass tumblers in a glass-fronted cabinet above. Chris took one down and half filled it, tossed it off and caught himself before he could repeat the performance. A bit of Dutch courage was good. Too much, less so. And there were still things he could do.

  Sitting in the warm flood of sunshine, Chris took two deep breaths, counted to ten, and phoned Stan. The long drone of “number unobtainable” met his ear. He cursed his shaky hands, started again with slow care, making sure to get it right. But the result was the same. Cut off. That bloody father of his, no doubt. It was always the way—once one thing went wrong, it all went to hell together.

  He left the tumbler in the sink, went out the way he’d come in, and within quarter of an hour was drawing up outside Stan’s house. The family was in the front garden, having a barbecue—there was no need even to ring the bell before the shit hit the fan. All he had to do was to get out of the car.

  He walked through the gate and onto the lawn as Stan’s mum touched her husband on the arm and Fred put down the lemon he’d been drizzling on the chops and picked up the fire poker. Stan had been sitting in the shade of the porch, hunched over a handheld device, his gingery hair in his eyes and his white face more than usually sullen. He looked up as the bellow of his dad’s shout broke the peace, and there was a kind of despairing gratitude in his eyes that Chris didn’t feel he had time to deal with.

  “Stan, they’ve got Ben. I need a trace on his phone. Can you do that?”

  Chris dodged the flailing arms of Fred Grimshore, leapt back out of the way of the whistle of the poker.

  “No problem, Mr. G, I’ll just get my stuff.” Stan was on his feet, dodging back into the house and closing the front door behind him. His mother gave a cry of distress or anger, dashed after him, but he had latched the door. She found keys, tried to turn them in the lock and found the door bolted on the inside. Distracted, Fred looked away, and Chris ran to the car, started it and got it round the back of the house just in time for Stan to drop first a rucksack and then himself out of his bedroom window onto the carefully positioned trampoline below, and thence onto the lawn. The boy vaulted over the low backyard fence, wrenched open the passenger door and poured himself inside.

  Chris drove away as though there were five Junkers 88s on his tail.

  “Fucking hell,” said Stan, appreciatively, “that was like something out of the movies. Jailbreak! Are the cops on our tail and everything?”

  “If they weren’t before, they undoubtedly are now.”

  At Chris’s expression, Stan’s smile faltered. “They don’t mean anything, my folks. Couple of windbags. Never done anything for me—tuition, parts, special skills—they didn’t want none of it. They’d be happy if I went down the mill for the rest of my life. Philistines.”

  “Ben’s phone?” Chris asked, and then moved by the softly stubborn expression, “Maybe they just didn’t have the money for that stuff? Have you thought about the RAF? They’d sponsor you through college. For your mind, they’d think it was a bargain.”

  “Don’t want to kill people, all due respect.” Stan had extracted a black box from his bag, was now unfolding a spindly wire dish that looked as if it was made of kitchen sieves and coat hangers. Some sort of radar, Chris assumed, trying not to feel rebuked.

  “Well, it feels different when the other fellow is also trying to kill you,” he said, and took them out to the ring road where they could circle until they got a fix.

  It came within minutes of Stan switching his contraption on. “Kind of left and a bit down,” he said, pushing back
his hood to see the readout clearer. “Out of town, up towards the hills.” He waved his arm in an arc that made suspicion trickle like ice water down Chris’s back.

  Chris turned the car and began heading for the Nine Ladies stone circle, Stan confirming the turns all the way. The shapes of clouds and sunshine moved over the silver-grey road between its dry stone walls, gilded and silvered the green grass and the speedwell flowers, orange poppies and heather dark as yew. The bones of the country began to show beneath the skin.

  “You know where you’re going,” said Stan, as Chris turned before the boy had a chance to tell him to.

  Chris gave a gallows smile. “I’m guessing, but it’s looking more likely with every turn. I hope… But, yes. Well…”

  They had to draw up by the side of the road, and there was a layby and a little footpath, marked by ramblers, defaced by tossed-aside Coke cans and crisp packets. Stan squinted at the glare of the high sun as he got out—he was without his normal baseball cap. Chris fetched his fedora from the boot, landed it on top of Stan’s head, making the boy smile. “It’ll be okay, Mr. G, there’s a good signal from his phone. He’s probably asleep, right? Like Rip Van Winkle in the middle of the fairy ring. We’ll wake him up and it’ll be fine.”

  He angled the dish with hands that were heavily freckled by the sun. He had the overlarge hands and feet of a growing boy, and his voice slipped from girlish to growl midsentence. He was, Chris realised, very young. Perhaps too young to bring into this business. Though, God knew, Ashby Cunningham on B flight had been almost the same when he was shot down over Hamburg, having lied about his age on admissions.

  There was no sign of the fog Ben had spoken of, though the wind was silky with moisture. Chris found a gap in the hedge, brushed past, taking cobwebs with him, scrambled up onto the field in which the nine stones stood. The dancers, they were called, witches, dancing at their sabbat out here in the lonely country under the swollen sky, who had been turned to stone by a passing saint with no regard for their families or friends.