I checked my own watch. “We’d better go and check in.” I stood up and nudged Lew, and he half-heartedly began to gather our bags together. “You don’t think we’re being just a little bit too enthusiastic, do you?” I asked Rowland. “Lucius could have made it all up.”
Rowland shook his head. “He wasn’t the type. He couldn’t be bothered to be creative unless money or prestige were involved. What did he have to gain? Who was he going to impress with a story like that? He could show his guests the pictures on his floor. Who would care?”
“He wasn’t like us, Rowland,” I said, wanting to shake him. “We don’t know what he thought was important. Telling his friends that he’d met a bunch of aliens might have made him everybody’s favourite neighbour.”
Rowland sighed. We’d gone over and over this argument in the portakabin at Stafford Bishop, while the rain poured down and Lew sat sulkily in a corner. Lucius hadn’t known what the homunculi were, and he hadn’t cared, particularly. The little red men with the horns had been oddities, a good story to tell his mates, and once they were dead there hadn’t been any more of them and they’d just dropped straight out of history — unless Rowland was right and someone else had used them as their model for the classical image of the Devil. Maybe a skull had turned up in Rome decades later. A horned skull. That might have got people’s attention, particularly if the records of the homunculi had been lost. Somehow, over a series of increasingly fraught calls on my mobile — one of which had actually involved yelling — Rowland had managed to convince, cajole and variously blackmail a number of people into giving us quite a lot of money to fund our separate investigations. I didn’t want to know the details. I did know that a large sum of cash had suddenly appeared in my bank account, which was interesting.
“You really think Lucius sat in a holding cage in the Colosseum and had a conversation with the Devil?” I said. “And then the Devil and his friends went upstairs and were slaughtered for the entertainment of a few thousand Romans?”
“Is that any more outlandish than believing that they landed on the Black Sea coast in a bronze starship?”
“Oh, quite possibly,” I said.
“Not the Devil, Jim,” he reminded me. “Something which became the model for the representation of the Devil.” He shrugged. “Myself, I think they’ll still turn out to be a branch of Homo sapiens. A completely unknown branch of Homo sapiens. There’s a very strong chance that we’re about to make history.”
“I have a very strong urge to punch you,” I told him.
“And if you do turn out to be right, and there are starship remains in Romania, you and Lewis are going to be the most famous men on Earth.”
We looked at Lewis. Lewis, I felt, was not going to be very good company. “I still have a very strong urge to punch you.” I also had a very strong urge to punch Lewis.
Rowland glanced up the departure boards. “They’re calling my flight.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Have a nice time in Italy.”
He picked up his carry-on bag, which in typical Rowland fashion was almost the size of a normal person’s suitcase, but that didn’t matter because he’d be able to talk the cabin staff into letting him take it onto the plane.
“Stay in touch,” he told me as he started to walk towards his gate. “We have to coordinate things. If Romania turns out to be a dead end, you can join me in Rome.”
“All right,” I said. “Good luck.”
“You too,” he said.
I watched him walk away through the crowds of holidaymakers and business people in the terminal, a stout little pensioner moving with a great and terrible purpose, setting out to rewrite human history.
“And you never know,” he called over his shoulder. “It might really have been the Devil.”
v
Stories start with a lot of things — a word or a phrase or a line of dialogue or a place. This one started with the description of Rowland eating his fish and chips, I have no idea why. A lot of the time, the idea cooks for a while and doesn’t go anywhere, but this one had legs. Putting a story together, for me anyway, is just an exercise in answering questions. Jim and Rowland are in the restaurant for some reason. What is it? Jim’s driving Rowland somewhere. Why? Where? You answer questions like this, and other questions come up, and you answer them too, and at some point the story’s finished. I’m a ferociously idle writer; I find it very hard work, and this one was hard to get right. I’m still not sure I’ve managed it.
All The News, All The Time, From Everywhere
On the first of August, Rex killed the pig.
He didn’t do it willingly, but none of us was really sorry to see it go. It was an enormous, bad-tempered bastard that we’d been keeping in a shed around the back of the office for months, feeding it on an outrageous stinking swill that Harry kept going in a big pot with scraps and garbage begged and borrowed from some of the schools in the area.
If it had been left to us, the pig would have starved to death, because it smelled like a sewer and attacked anything that moved, but Rex made us draw up a feeding rota, and every four days it fell to me to approach the shed with two buckets of swill, gingerly open the door, and pitch the buckets inside before slamming the door shut again. For such a big animal, with such little legs, the pig was colossally quick, and it had jaws like bolt cutters.
Rex was ashamed of the pig. It was the living, breathing, grunting embodiment of just how badly the Globe was doing. The yard behind the office was choked with empty cages and wire boxes and wooden stalls, where once there had been a thriving menagerie of goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigeons and even the odd badger or two. Now they were all gone, and all we had was the pig.
Still, he put off killing it as long as he could. He and Harry went out onto the moors and trapped crows. Local poachers sometimes brought in foxes or rabbits. Ben produced his astrological charts. Lucie examined the interior of everyone’s teacup. And in this way the Globe continued to bring the news to our particular little corner of Derbyshire. It wasn’t very exciting news, but considering what we had to work with it was a miracle we got a paper out at all.
But it wasn’t enough. The advertisers started to fall away, leaving us with great gaping holes in the paper, which I was sent out to fill with microscopically-nitpicking accounts of Women’s Institute meetings, weddings and funerals. I went to so many weddings and funerals that the vicar only half-jokingly suggested I might like to stand in for him sometimes.
And it still wasn’t enough. Rex watched the paper haemorrhaging money, looked bankruptcy in the face, and killed the pig.
He did it in the afternoon, when the Summer heat had built up enough in the newsroom to make the air stand still despite the fans, and the staff were quietly nodding off over their typewriters.
My fan had just run down again, and I’d got up to wind its clockwork when there was this incredible unearthly screech from outside and everyone in the office sat bolt upright.
We all looked at each other, and that awful noise came again. It was the sound of every nightmare HP Lovecraft ever had coming to destroy civilisation. It was the sound of a man discovering that his entire family had been wiped out in a gas explosion. It was the sound of a thousand young children being hurled into the whirling blades of a combine harvester.
It stopped.