And all was a riot of noise from the tremendous quaking, and things throughout the tea house were crackling and fracturing into myriad pieces. And there was a thunderous rumble underneath it all that told the ear what the body could already feel and the eye could already see.
Molly tugged at the closed door that had wedged itself into its frame and she could not open it. Conversely, Ruth and Jane’s door flung itself open on its own and, in fact, unhinged itself entirely from its frame, ripping through the drapery hanging in front of it. Through the cloud of dust the two could see the large copper gasolier in the dining room swinging wildly back and forth like a mad pendulum, while beneath it a wooden Buddha rolled its roly-poly self across the rippling, heaving, snapping floorboards like a performing Chinese tumbler.
In her own little cell, Carrie covered her mouth and nose with her hand.
But even in that intermediary moment between sleep and wakefulness, she recognized and registered the acrid tang of smoke.
She was the first to smell it. And she was the one to wake and alert her sisters and Jane’s brother Lyle to the frightening reality of it, situated as they were upon surplus army cots in the basement storeroom of Sister Lydia’s new tabernacle.
Quickly did they all wake and just as quickly did they spring to their feet. It was Lyle who stated the obvious: “The building’s on fire. We have to get out.”
There was a little window in one corner of the room, but it was too high and seemed far too small for even Molly, the most petite of the six, to squeeze through it.
Jane was at the door now and pulling it open, only to be knocked backward upon her heels by a blast of smoke from the outside corridor. All began coughing and choking, each struggling for breath as the room became quickly filled with a thick fog of particulates and soot and ash. Each knew that survival meant leaving this room, for closing the door would only postpone the unthinkable. And so into the smoke they went, hands and handkerchiefs and pillowcases covering gasping mouths, each with one hand left free to grab the hand of another. Heads tucked and eyes half-closed, the six shouldered their way into the darkness — commending themselves into the waiting arms of either death or salvation, their fate dependent on how extensive had spread the electrical fire which only a few minutes earlier had been but a tiny spark, though now was something large and menacing and ravenous for the very oxygen We Six required to execute their escape.
In the midst of the darkness each of the six could hear the frightened cries and frantic, desperate shouts of those fellow shelter dwellers who had also been cast into a state of utter blindness by the blast. It was a 1,400-kilo semi-armour piercing bomb that had deeply penetrated the ground beneath Balham High Road just north of the Balham Northern line station. It exploded upon impact with the cross passageway between the two platforms and immediately unleashed a terrific volume of water from severed mains and shattered sewer pipes — the water gushing directly into the stygian subterranean tube station.
We Six could hear the sound of the cascading water as it quickly began to flood the Balham tube. It was Molly who first noted the wetness about her ankles as the gathering stream coursed past.
“Maggie! Maggie, where are you?” she called. Maggie, who was standing no more than two or three feet away, swung her arms about until she made contact with Molly in the blackness and latched a hand upon her arm.
Nearby, but seemingly miles away down the platform, its cowl of darkness being pricked by little pinpoints of light from the engagement of matches and little candles and cigarette lighters, were Ruth and Jane, who had also found one another and each of whom now clung to her sister in cold, silent terror. Carrie and Lyle hadn’t similar good fortune. Separated by the panicked thrashings and flailings of those who were rising from their sleeping spots, now sacrificed to that growing river of water and mud and sludge that was once the southbound platform of Balham Station, Carrie and Lyle could only call to one another, though it was difficult to be heard over the frightened screams and the roar of the surging torrent.
The sound rose and now became nearly deafening in its volume. The wind that was its source was fast whipping itself into a maddening circle about the barn. Yet Lyle continued to call out for Carrie to come to him, as he, in turn, tried to make his way to her. As the sideboards of the barn flew off and away, the entire structure became a skeleton-like vestige of what had only a moment earlier been wholly intact — a deceptively safe refuge for the five young women and one young man who had sought shelter there.
Ruth and Jane locked arms around each other’s hips as they hooked their other arms around a wooden post set into the corner of a horse stall, each debating whether they should flee the doomed structure altogether and take their chances in the open.
Molly and Maggie were considering the same, having watched the horses and the one frightened cow do that very thing without thought in their bestial brains for what might be the consequences. In the end, the two struggled through the churning wind and flying debris toward a large tractor which sat heavy and solid and unmoving in the middle of what was left of the dismantling barn.
As Molly took her few steps in this direction, putting herself upon the doorstep of her cousin’s house, she felt something hard and heavy strike her head and down she went. As she sank into unconsciousness, Molly looked briefly into the eyes of the madman now staring down at her with crazed, lascivious eyes. In that next moment Maggie sprang upon the man and began pounding his chest with angry fists for what he’d done, only to be flung to the ground by his companion. As the brace of men moved to make lecherous assault upon their two victims, their advance was halted by Jemma’s father, who had at that moment swung open his front door and aimed a gun at them with the threat that he would use it if they did not vacate his property on the instant.
Other men of the town were running wildly and riotously about, smashing windows and tumbling things with hysterical fury. There were women tearing at their hair and their clothes, for it was now believed by many of those abroad that the multi-hued skies had opened special portals through which the righteous had already been uplifted into the loving embrace of the Almighty, and those who were left behind could only presume rejection, denunciation, and damnation from on high. And so they would act upon their unbridled rage over this unfortunate turn of fortune through ravagings and mindless violence and all other acts of brutish depravity, doomed as they now were.
There were still others who saw nothing apocalyptic or eschatological in the goings-on, but were nonetheless motivated to commit theft and sundry acts of mischief as means to survival in a lunatic world now suddenly made captive to mankind’s most base instincts.
Reginald Prowse stood at the window next to Jane and Ruth, who had been hurried into the house. Mirabella Prowse brought a salve for his hands. They had been burnt only moments earlier by sparks that had flown from the telegraph instrument and by the small fire the sparks had ignited upon his desk and which he had fumblingly smothered out with a blanket. “It’s a geomagnetic storm from the sun, is all it is,” he said. “That’s what has caused this. Nothing else. But I cannot explain why a scientific phenomenon, easily explained, should have thrown this town into such a state of madness. Here is a phenomenon that absolutely beggars comprehension.”
“They think it’s the end of the wo—” Jane wasn’t given leave by circumstance to finish her sentence before a brick came crashing through the window and struck her in the shoulder.