“Full of piss and self-importance,” Mildred interrupted. “Striding along, thumbs in his watch chain, like he owned the whole town.”
“Looked like the fabled Akond of Swat,” Doc suggested. “Living proof of pride coming before the fall.”
“He fell over, did he?” Ryan asked, grinning in readiness at the joke.
“Eventually,” Krysty said, giggling. “After he trod in the biggest cow flop you ever saw.”
The film had been rolling on.
Forde had talked over the whispered conversation of Ryan and his companions. “Here’s the whole town in a single shot. Watch that kid with buck teeth on the left. Now the camera’s moving slowly to the right. And look who’s on the right-hand of the line, seeming like he’s a little out of breath.”
“Kid with buck teeth,” Ryan said quietly, the burst of laughter confirming his obvious guess.
“Happens in nearly every ville I visit,” Forde stated complacently.
Ryan was almost overcome with stultifying boredom. Part of him desperately wanted to see these marvelous films, some of them showing a Deathlands that was gone forever. Life expectancy in Deathlands was around forty for men and in the midthirties for women, plagued with birthing deaths, which meant that the hideous horror of skydark, at the beginning of the new century, was lost to everyone except the extraordinarily old. And Deathlands didn’t have many of them.
“Now I want to show you some movies I’ve made with a few special effects. Folk appearing and vanishing miraculously and stuff like that. Could be a bit midnight scary. So, if you’ve got a nervous disposition, hold on to your partner’s hand. If you don’t have a partner, hold on to someone else’s partner.”
The joke went down like a lead balloon.
Ryan felt the short hairs prickling at his nape at the sudden certainty that something had changed in the butcher’s back room.
“Lover,” Krysty breathed, her fingers tightening on his hand. “Feel that?”
“Yeah.”
There was a whispering silence, a stillness in the air, as if everyone was instantly frozen into immobility.
The loudest sound was the clicking of the projector, the film slotting through the gate.
Forde was conscious that he’d mysteriously lost the attention and interest of his audience.
“What’s wrong, folks? Someone died in here? Only kidding, of course.”
“What?” Ryan whispered. “Tell me what the fucking film’s showing now!”
Krysty hesitated a moment. “Old ship, alongside a dock. Ruined ville behind it. Loads of rats pouring off the vessel. Close-up of some of them. They’ve got a double layer of teeth, Ryan. Needle pointed.”
“Go on.”
“A man appeared. Could be Forde himself. Wearing a weird wig that makes him look bald.”
Doc recognized the allusion in the last reel of film. “Nosferatu, the vampire,” he muttered.
But it was a crudely edited and jumpily shot scene, the camera seeming to be operated by an oddly inexpert hand.
Forde kept turning and leering campily at the screen, though at least twice he was clearly calling out orders to whoever worked the camera.
Then the tricks startedclumsy and unsophisticated compared to the amazing special effects Doc had seen just before they gave him his time push into Deathlands from December 2000.
But the audience in the slaughterhouse in Bramton acted as if they’d never seen anything like it before. There was shrieking from women, men yelling and children bawling. To Doc’s right someone stood up and then slumped down to the blood-slick floor in a dead faint.
“Only a film!” Forde called out, trying to hang on to a semblance of order.
“Too little and too late, my old chum,” Doc said to himself, watching as bodies jerked across in front of the white swathe of light, turning into capering, distorted shadows for a few delirious seconds.
“Don’t panic! No need for this. I’ll switch off the film. There.”
The flickering images vanished from the sheet, being replaced by a stark-white rectangle of dazzling light that spilled over and showed the disemboweled corpses of the animals, swinging from their hooks.
Doc actually considered for a moment the possibility of fighting his way to the front of the panicked throng and making shadow shapes of camels and crocodiles and bunny rabbits with his fingers.
But he sat again as a bizarre figure appeared in the core of the light, as sudden as a pantomime demon, holding up both hands for silence.
“Everyone sit down,” said the cultured, gentle voice from the young man.
“Who the fuck’s that?” Ryan hissed.
“I think we’ve just met a member of the Family,” Krysty replied.
Chapter Sixteen
“Six feet three. Weighs Be surprised if he tipped the scales above one-ten. Slim build. Long white hair and pale face. Looks quite a bit like Jak. Black suit, beautifully cut. And a I guess it’s a cloak across his shoulders. Black satin, lined with scarlet silk. From the quality of his clothes, the Family must be seriously wealthy.”
“Age?”
“Difficult, lover. Around the late twenties, into the thirties.”
“Weapons?”
“Nothing I can see. No obvious bulges under the arm or at the hip. His clothes are cut too well and too tight to let him hide a blaster.”
The panic in the audience had subsided instantly at the appearance of the young man. Everyone turned and looked for their seats, and those who had fallen were helped to their feet by their neighbors.
Forde was fumbling with the controls of the projector, eventually finding the control that switched off the powerful halogen bulbs, plunging the blood-scented abattoir back into total blackness.
“Dean, would you switch on the lights on the wall by the door where we came in?”
Ryan felt his son move away and was aware of a stab of something that he guessed was fear.
He felt for Krysty’s hand and held her tightly. “Things all right?” he whispered.
The voice that answered came from a dozen feet away and slightly to his right, where he knew the movie screen had been. “Everything is perfectly all right, Mr. Cawdor. The alarm is over.”
“So I hear. You have me at a disadvantage, Mr? You can see me, but I don’t see you.”
“Seeing and not seeing are merely the opposing sides of the same coin.”
“Can’t say I believe that. And I still don’t hear your name.”
“I’m Elric Cornelius. I am one of the members of what is known locally as ‘the Family,’ I believe. And you and your friends are welcome to Bramton.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, the taint of blood in this room is quite overwhelming. Can I suggest we all move outside into the afternoon sunshine before I am overcome by the smell.”
His voice was languid and gentle. Ryan had a strange and sudden vision of an elegant snake, coiled on a warm stone, when the man talked.
But his words had an immediate effect on the villagers of Bramton.
Chairs tumbled over again as they almost fought to get out of the butcher’s back room, pushing and jostling. Ryan sat where he was, still holding Krysty’s hand. He heard J.B.’s voice rise over the bedlam and the sound of a single round from the Uzi, fired into the ceiling.
“Cut out the panic! Door’s plenty wide enough for everyone to get out safe and unhurt. Now, calm down and shut the noise, all right?”
“Well said, Mr. Dix.” Cornelius hadn’t moved during the brief hubbub. “My family sometimes puzzles at the way good, honest, decent, sensible folks are moved to behave like headless chickens. It is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery.”
“Shrouded in an enigma,” Doc added. “You left that part out.”
“Indeed, I did, Dr. Tanner. And you were right to reproach me for it.”
“Wasn’t a reproach, young man. Much more of a small jog to your memory for quotations.”
“I stand corrected, Doctor.” There followed a meaningful pause that Ryan could almost see. “It is a rare experience for any member of the Family to be corrected.”
Ryan wasn’t sure if Doc recognized the cold anger that lay behind the gentle words. But to his heightened senses, it sounded like the crack of a lash across the face.
There was the noise of everyone leaving the room, muted and subdued.
“Who’s left?” he whispered to Krysty.
“All of us. Winthrop and Cornelius.”
Once again he heard the bored voice, revealing that Cornelius had preternaturally sharp hearing to have picked up the breathed words from Krysty.
“And Mr. Winthrop will be leaving to join the rest of his flock, Miss Wroth.”
“Yeah, I’m on my way. Stayed behind in case you wanted Thought you might need me to Nobody to be picked for today, though? Not time.”
The words from the mayor of the ville tumbled nervously, one over another.
“For pity’s sake, Mr. Winthrop,” Cornelius said, betraying the first hint of emotion. “You must allow your brain to function before you operate your mouth. Think before you speak, man.”
“Sorry, Mr. Cornelius. Sorry about that.” Feet moved quickly over the sticky floor, the door opened and then closed, so quietly that Ryan could barely hear it.