Given luck, they reckoned that they could manage.
Fewer of the Vyrnwy river valley people had survived than their neighbours in New Dyfnant had hoped, and most of the scattered handfuls that did fell to the madmen.
In the first minutes after the earthquake, the majority had managed to reach the vinegar masks they had prepared. But house damage had been greater than in New Dyfnant. Many had been trapped or crushed; vinegar and gauze carefully kept ready had often been buried in wreckage; the untrapped desperately trying to free the trapped had often forgotten about their masks till it was too late. And almost at once, into the middle of this chaos, had swept the great wall of water from the burst dam.
How the few refugees from the flood who had been able to reach higher ground on the other side of the valley had fared, New Dyfnant did not know as yet. But thirty or forty of them from the near side had reached the village and been taken in by families with relatively undamaged homes or housed temporarily in the village hall. All but three of them had arrived holding vinegar masks to their faces and claimed to have been using them from the start. The three without masks had been locked up with Tom Jenkins – two of -them were too numb with shock to protest. The third resisted so violently that Dai Police had had to handcuff him till he cooled down, which had taken half an hour while Dai talked to him, using up time the constable could ill spare.
Over the next few days, the four prisoners loomed large in the village's conscience and its fears. Everybody knew what would happen to them but nobody knew what would have to be done with them. Dai Police had no cell, so they had to be kept in the safest place available – one of Jack Llewellyn's lock-up garages, which they made as comfortable and warm as they could for them.
Once Eileen had made sure that everyone in the forest camp was well and safe, she had come down to the village to offer her help to Dr Owen. The doctor, rushed off his none-too-young feet, was very grateful, not only because of the number of injured he had to attend to, but because Eileen was the only person with direct experience of handling Dust victims. Her advice was grim but inescapable: strait-jackets would have to be improvised as quickly as possible and they would have to be worn continuously from the third day. She insisted (which Dr Owen considered very brave of her) on explaining this to the four men herself. She softened the facts as much as she could; they knew that the Dust would drive them mad because they had been told so when Eileen's warning had first been passed to them – this had been essential, both to drive home the warning's importance and to prevent the unafflicted from being caught unawares. But in talking to the four, she deliberately gave the impression that this madness came in fits, intermittently, with periods of sanity in between and that the strait-jackets were needed because the fits were unpredictable and they might injure themselves and each other when they were seized by them. It would be more cruel than they could bear to tell them the whole truth, that very soon the madness would be continuous and without hope. They were sick enough and frightened enough, already.
She managed, she hoped, to persuade them and to keep her poise while she did so. But as soon as she was out of their hearing, and the lock-up door clanged down behind her, she burst into tears in Dr Owen's fatherly arms.
'I'm sorry, Doctor… I…'
'Don't you say that, Eileen fach. You were a bloody marvel and that's a fact. Have a good bawl now and be done with it.'
'But what's to become of them?'
'God alone knows, my dear. I daren't think of it or I'd weep myself. Come along now. Let's see how they're getting on with those damn jackets.'
Dai Police's wife Joan had organized a sewing party who were hard at work making the jackets from sail-cloth commandeered from a dinghy in somebody's back garden -a dinghy that would never sail on Lake Vyrnwy again, because Lake Vyrnwy was now a sea of mud with a stream in the middle. 'Feel as though we were plaiting hangmen's nooses, we do,' Joan said glumly but got on with it.
The strait-jackets were never used.
They were ready on the third day with Eileen growing increasingly nervous and impatient, but there had been delay in finding adequate thread. Dai Police, the doctor and Eileen set off for the lock-up with two strong men as escort in case of trouble. The escort carried shotguns; there had been a noticeable tendency, since the earthquake, for those who possessed them (as most families did, with so many rabbits and other game to hand) to keep them within easy reach. Carrying arms went against the grain with Dai Police; he had in his safe a.32 automatic and a hundred rounds of ammunition which had been handed in by the executors of a retired colonel, recently dead, but so far he had not overcome his reluctance to wear it.
When they reached the lock-up it was empty. The door had been smashed open from the inside.
For a moment nobody spoke; they all stood staring, perplexed and paralysed, at the ruined door. Then a faint call from the garage forecourt set them running to where Jack Llewellyn lay, bloodstained and half-stunned. Jack waved a feeble arm along the street and croaked, 'After them, for God's sake!' before he collapsed again.
The doctor cried, 'See to him, Eileen!' and the four men sprinted away up the road. It was just as well Eileen was occupied with attending to Jack's injuries, because it saved her from witnessing what followed.
They caught up with Tom Jenkins and the others outside the school. That Tom himself, and one of the valley men, were completely in the grip of the violent madness was obvious at once. The other two seemed disorientated and hesitant, as though they had been infected by the first two's madness and swept along by it, but were uncertain what was happening. All four turned to face their pursuers, glaring at them wild-eyed, and Tom gave a terrible wordless roar like a bull.
'Easy, now, Tom,' Dai said, with little hope of getting through to him, but feeling the attempt had to be made. 'Easy now. You know us. We want to help you, man.'
For a fraction of a second the eight of them were a frozen tableau – whether the madmen would attack or take flight seemed to hang in the balance. It was broken by the sound of children laughing and running.
Geraint Lloyd's contribution to the crisis, after the first day, had been to keep the school working and parents had been only too glad to have the children off their hands. Now, at just the wrong moment, a dozen of the younger ones poured out of the school door into the street.
The high-pitched clamour seemed to infuriate the madmen. Snarling, they turned on the children.
Dai and the others raced forward but Tom reached the children first, snatching up seven-year-old Becky Reece in his great hands, holding her at arms' length, roaring, crushing…
By chance, Becky's father was one of the escort. Without a word, he put his twelve-bore to Tom's head and fired.
The whole scene was over in seconds, but it stuck in Dr Owen's memory for the rest of his life. Geraint yelling to the children to come back in. Three more shots. The children's stampede back to the schoolhouse. The sudden silence. The four dead madmen in the village street. Becky's father, his gun dropped, clutching his bruised and weeping daughter, babbling reassurance to her.
They held a village meeting that evening. It did not last long; even the pale and shocked Rev. Phillips acquiesced in the decision, though by common consent he was excused from voting.
From that night, until the madness danger was known to be over, a rota of armed men would guard the approaches to the village from the valley. Dr Owen had described the symptoms of the madness in detail, though in fact they could not be mistaken. Healthy refugees would be admitted. Refugees with bronchial symptoms would be locked up in Jack Llewellyn's garage, which would be repaired next morning and made impregnable; they would not be released until the doctor had pronounced them clear.