The Long Earth

‘Put me down a hundred yards away.’ Joshua thought it over. ‘And then jump a few worlds away, shift a little in space, and step back. Maybe if there is somebody still here you can lure them out.’

‘ “Lure them out.” Hardly a reassuring idea.’

‘Just do it, Lobsang.’

The airship descended.

There was a stink of grease, of burning meat.

Joshua, with parrot on his shoulder, walked down a straight-line dirt street. A few rooks, irritated, climbed into the air. It was a surprisingly well-developed community to find so far out. The buildings were wattle and daub on sturdy timber frames, set out in neat rectilinear rows. He supposed the pioneers who had laid out these plots and street had dreamed of the city to be built one day on this plan. Now many of the buildings were burned out; further away, a whole district smoked fitfully.

He came to his first body. She was a middle-aged woman who had had her throat ripped out. No human had done this, surely.

Joshua walked on. He found more people, in a ditch, in the doorways, inside the houses, men, women and children. Some of them looked as if they had been running when they were struck down. None of them seemed to be wearing Steppers, but that wasn’t unusual. They had been at home here, in this world; they thought they were safe.

He reached the big central building on its hillock. If this place followed the pattern of most religion-based colonies, this was most likely the church, the holy building, the first permanent structure to be erected, and as such it would house a lot of the community’s common property like the radio station and any power unit. It was also the place of refuge when disaster struck, as churches had been throughout western history. There were certainly a lot of bodies around the building. Maybe the enemy had struck just after morning prayers, or whatever equivalent ceremony the Victims had. Morning Stand-Up, perhaps.

The doors were closed. There could be anything inside. Black clouds of flies flew up as Joshua approached, and rooks watched resentfully from rooftops.

The airship reappeared, right above him.

‘Lobsang, any movement?’

‘No hot spots near you.’

‘I’m going to try the church. Temple, whatever.’

‘Be careful.’

He came to double doors set in a stout wall, of stone faced with some kind of plaster. Joshua tried a kick, and nearly broke his ankle. He braced for another try.

‘Save your fragile endoskeleton,’ Lobsang said dryly. ‘There’s an open door at the back.’

The back door was, in fact, smashed off its hinges and sagged outward into the street. Joshua walked through the broken frame into a little radio room where a transmitter was still sending its innocent message to the universe. Joshua respectfully shut it off. Another door led to a utility room, the kind of combined kitchen and junk store that every church or church hall would have; there was a tea urn, and playgroup toys of crudely carved wood. There were even children’s finger paintings on the walls, and a cleaning rota, written in English. It would have been Sister Anita Dowsett’s turn next week.

A further door led into the main hall. And this was where most of the bodies were. Blood filmed the floor and spattered the walls, and flies buzzed in a cloud over the slumped, still forms.

Moving into the room, Joshua had to step over the bodies, a handkerchief to his mouth. He turned some of them over, inspecting wounds. At first he thought they’d fled in here, seeking the safety of thick walls and heavy doors — even these far-flung pioneers would fall back on ancient instincts. But there was something odd about the pattern.

‘Joshua?’

‘I’m here, Lobsang.’ He reached an altar. The centrepiece was a big silver hand thumbing a golden nose. ‘These were comedy atheists. It must have been fun living here. They didn’t deserve this. If it’s a crime, if humans did this, we’ll have to report it when we go back.’

‘It wasn’t people, Joshua. Look around. All the wounds are gouges. Bites. Crushed skulls. This was the work of animals, frightened animals. And that door behind you was broken outwards, not inwards. Whatever did this didn’t come in through the door. It stepped in here, and pushed its way out through the door.’

Joshua nodded. ‘So maybe the townsfolk didn’t seek shelter in here. They were here already, at their morning service. And whatever it was erupted right in the middle of them. Stepping animals, that were fleeing — something.’

‘The beasts panicked, evidently. But I do wonder what effect the weed fumes I detect in the air had on them…’

Joshua found himself staring down at one broken body. Naked, hair-covered — not human. A body of roughly human proportions, slim, obviously bipedal, of evident wiry strength, on which was set a small head, like a chimp’s, with an ape’s flat nose. Not a troll, but some other kind of humanoid. It had been killed by a knife wound to the throat; the chest was soaked with drying blood. Somebody had had the guts to fight back, then, against the fury of the terrified super-strong ape-men that had stepped into the middle of his or her family.

‘You see this, Lobsang?’

Cameras on the parrot whirred and panned. ‘I see it.’

Joshua stepped back from the corpse and stood, eyes closed, imagining. ‘We’re on a hilltop, the highest point for a good way around. A dense forest is a difficult place to step in a hurry. If you wanted to flee with your family across many worlds you’d be forced to congregate in an open place, a high point, because you’d otherwise be blocked by the trees. But in this particular world the townsfolk had built their church on the highest point. Right in the way.’

‘Go on.’

‘I think these creatures were stepping. Gathered on the hilltop, heading East, fleeing away from the worlds further West, like the trolls. Stampeding.’

Lobsang asked, ‘Stampeding from what? That’s a question we will have to answer before we can go home, Joshua.’

‘Suddenly they found themselves here, in this enclosed space, with all these humans. They panicked. More and more of them piled in… They killed everybody in here, they broke out, they hunted down everybody else.’

‘From what we know of them, Joshua, trolls wouldn’t do that. Consider how they treated Private Percy. They could have killed him easily.’

‘Perhaps not. But these weren’t trolls.’

‘I would like to suggest we label these creatures elves. I’m drawing on more mythology, partial records of more tentative, misunderstood encounters, with mysterious, slender, human-like creatures who passed through our world, ghost-like. The existence of a variety of stepping humanoids could justify a large body of mythology, Joshua.’

‘And no doubt you’re drawing on other encounters out in the Long Earth you haven’t told me about,’ Joshua said dryly.

‘That too. By the way,’ Lobsang said more urgently, ‘I’ve spotted something else. Maybe a quarter-mile west of your position.’

‘Humans? Trolls? What?’

‘Go see.’

29

HE HURRIED OUT of the church, relieved to be in the open air, away from the stink of blood.

A quarter-mile west, Lobsang had said. Joshua glanced at the position of the sun, turned and ran that way.