Chapter Five : Through the Rush-Hour with Love

Whatever was masquerading as a humanoid figure discarded the pretense with the same ease and casual awfulness as it did Susan's corpse. The body that slumped to the ground had been ravaged from the inside out by burrowing gatherings of metallic tentacles, each about a finger's-width in diameter and tipped with a snapping lamprey mouth studded with gleaming teeth. The thick motorcycle leathers were shredding into tattered fringes of dessicated flesh as the masses of writhing appendages disentangled themselves, unplaiting themselves with deadly determination.

The monstrosity – for to call it a creature would deny the general meaning of the word, although not the literal truth for it had clearly been created – that flung itself at Elizabeth was a nightmarish horror drawn from the mad dreams of an inhuman intellect. Bizarrely and almost comically, it was still wearing the black motorcycle helmet on what she assumed was its head, but the rest of its clothes were torn to shredded ruin. Its limbs and body had been formed of a solid mass of intertwined, knotted segmented metal tentacles, binding themselves together to create the illusion of arms and legs, unwrapping into individuality to mock fingers inside the gloves. Now, that illusion was gone – descending from the neck of the helmet was a writhing mass that floated in a billowing cloud of gleaming movement, clattering as servos moved the individual tubular segments of the tentacles. The thing was floating in the air, a weird howling hum and an ozone-tasting charge of static in the air offering the only explanation how. Abruptly, it gathered its tentacles into a sort of sweeping cone and thrust itself – squidlike – towards Elizabeth.

She was already leaping back, trying to bring the gun to bear, but by the time she did it was inside the arc of the end of the barrel. Rather than try to jump backwards again in order to get a shot in – because she had no certain idea of what lay behind her and suspected she had nowhere to go – she slid her hand onto the base of the stock and slammed the butt of the rifle across the visor of the helmet with all the strength she could muster.

The blow knocked it back – it was hovering in the air and there seemed to be little anchoring it in place – and shattered the plexiglas of the visor, smashing the helmet from its head. The thing buzzed madly and propelled itself towards her again, its head now revealed to be a gleaming steel sphere encrusted with lenses that dilated madly, reflecting and refracting the light in confusing ways.

It swept for her, its tentacles reaching for her and wrapping around her chest, its head sticking out like some obscene steel tumor from her ribcage. The writhing mass of metal constricted her breathing, but the thing did not have the strength she might have feared it did – she raised her arms above her head and slammed the butt of the gun into its cranium, shattering some of the lenses with a tinkling of glass.

The grip on her chest gave, and she smashed it again, denting the metal ball and sending the thing crashing to the ground. A third blow and the sphere cracked along some hidden seam, splitting into two beaten and crushed halves that rolled apart like a walnut shell. Inside that shell was something that was seamed and ridged and folded like a walnut; a dull gray lump of gristly tissue with fine wires feeding into it and connecting it to the inside of the armored shell. As Elizabeth watched, the flesh began to smoke and rot as the air reached it, the thing writhing and jerking like an octopus connected to a battery, relays shorting out in a shower of sparks.

Around Elizabeth, people were starting to their feet, gasping and screaming in horror. The table at which Elizabeth and Susan had sat was lying on the floor, the crimson-stained cloth half-covering Susan's savaged body, blood mingling with dark coffee and some vile purplish ichor that leaked from the shattered cranium of the writhing, jerking thing. Elizabeth kicked the twitching cyborg horror into the soupy waters of the Thames with distaste and disgust.

Underneath the screams and and panicked shouts, Elizabeth could hear that weird humming and still smell the charge of ozone in the air. She span, raising the rifle to her shoulder, and pressed the trigger. Her target was about fifteen yards away – one of the hideous metallic floating squids lashing its forest of tentacles like an anemone – and she had adjusted for fade. Too late she realized shots from this gun wouldn't fade over distance, and she cursed herself for an idiot, thinking she had wasted a shot. Something jerked the barrel of the gun up a degree or so, and the coruscating bolt of blue-white energy crackling with chained lightning spat from the crystal at the end and impacted precisely with the brain-case of the thing. The noise the gun made – a high-pitched plosive sound - would have been comic had it not been for the awful, dreadful seriousness of the situation. The air around her turned thicker with ionization and she could feel her hair begin to go light with the static electricity.

As the thing spasmed backwards, a neat hole drilled in its gleaming cranium and with all its legs folded up like a dead spider, Elizabeth felt the gun in her hand jerk slightly; some spring had worked inside the mechanism and a cylinder about the size of a lipstick jumped from an ejector port. Worked into a once-white bakelite panel on the butt were two rows of five tiny portholes, each backed in the same color. With a snap, one of them turned black. Elizabeth could smell charred insulation from the round that the gun had ejected – a capacitor, no doubt.

Elizabeth had no time to take notes, or to grieve. Bursting out of the Thames, trailing river-slime, were more of the things. Still more were shredding and shedding motorcycle leathers and clattering towards her. She span around, the gun held easily in her arms – they pretty much had her surrounded. They stopped a few yards from her, jerking back and forth, their eye-lenses dilating and contacting with a whir of servos, their claws clacking open and shut with the irregular noise of a relay-driven telephone exchange. One of them – it was impossible to tell which – buzzed at another. In Latin.

“It is the mother of the Prophecy. Do we proceed?” And then another buzzed back;

“Of course. She is only human.”

As one, they jumped towards her. She rolled to the right, cradling the gun in her arms, saving her ammunition. She met those to her right before they were perhaps expecting her, reaching as she stood up and grabbing a handful of tentacles. Somewhere, the sharp, unromantic cracking report of a more traditional gun echoed across the river and bounced from the high walls of the ziggurat. Of course, Elizabeth mused through gritted teeth, British intelligence is going to have police placed around its headquarters – and they aren't going to like squidy things any more than I do. She snarled and jerked her hand down, ignoring the tentacles that had wrapped around her wrist and forearm. The thing – weaker by far than she had expected – crashed into the concrete floor, its lenses shattering and metallic body denting.

The grip on her arm slackened, even as more segmented worms wrapped around her thighs, some coming horrifying close to some hideous probing. She jammed the barrel of the rifle single handed against one of the red eye-lenses of the thing grabbing her legs and pulled the trigger. Its head just exploded in a shower of boiling metal and vaporized nervous tissue even as she swung the other like a mace, smashing two others aside.

One of them had its appendages wrapped firmly around her neck, its lamprey mouths at the end of them reaching for her eyes and nose. She spat a curse, placed her left hand against the forest of carbuncled eyes and shoved hard. The creature didn't have the strength to resist her – pathetic, weak, flimsy things these metallic squids were – and its shiny brain-case squealed with deforming metal as she jammed it between two wrought-iron railings. Immediately, the thing stopped trying to grab her and wrapped its tentacles around the fence, trying to extricate itself. She shot it through the face.

The urgent drilling noise of submachine-guns set on three-round bursts echoed over the plaza; two police officers wearing black hard-shell armor were standing solidly, guns to their shoulders, picking targets, aiming, taking them down, repeating. There was something refreshing and elegant about their actions; clean, professional, dedicated. Elizabeth raised the rifle to her shoulder again, didn't correct for fade this time, and blasted another two of the things out of the sky with three shots.

Thick, bloodstained silence corrupted with the moans of the injured fell.

She paused, taking stock of the situation – aside from a few twitching ends of tentacles vanishing behind buildings and darting down back alleys, “living” assailants were nowhere to be seen. At her feet and strewn over the floor were fragments of twitching metal and a few smoking hunks of dessicated, air-burned tissue. There were a few people lying on the ground screaming or whimpering, not a few of them nursing injuries – one or two bullet wounds, but most of them burrowing gouges or slashes across soft tissue. The two police offers leveled the anonymous mouths of their guns at her.

“Drop the gun!” one of them shouted. “Drop the gun and put your hands on your head!”

Elizabeth was about to do no such thing – there were enemies about, and they needed all the weapons they could get. She certainly wasn't a professional shot, but she had learned the basics on grouse and pheasant hunts, and even a few big game safaris back in the '80s. She could certainly hold her own – and she doubted there were many women with as much of a knowledge of hand-to-hand combat with monsters as her in the country. She shook her head. “Officer, you need my help! Those things are still around.”

“Drop the gun, ma'am!” he shouted, as if he had not heard her. “Drop the gun or I will be forced to take further action!” Elizabeth was about to argue, when something happened that required something more decisive.

“Officer!” she shouted urgently, “Behind you!” He ignored her, choosing instead to re-settle the gun against his shoulder. His partner turned, saw what Elizabeth had seen, and yelled a warning.

It came too late – the creature crawling up behind him wrapped a couple of tentacles around the grip of the pistol in the hip holster and snapped it open with a couple more. Using his body as a shield, it whipped the gun clear with a fluid grace and – flicking the safety off and chambering a round with more of its innumerable appendages – raised the gun and shot him through the back of the head.

The bullet exited the bridge of his nose in a welter of brain and bone fragments. Even as he slumped Elizabeth shot at the creature, but her shot burned through his shoulder before it hit metal and it only lost a few tentacles. His partner opened up with a three-round burst, but the haze of blood in the air spoiled his aim and then the pistol spoke again and he collapsed to the floor, clutching vainly at his hemorrhaging leg. From nowhere, a virtual tide of the creatures pounced on him, their boring tentacles burrowing their way into his eyes and throat. He died screaming within seconds.

Elizabeth had three shots left – she used two blowing the wounded creature with the pistol out of the air, and then shot into the writhing mass of flashing metal once more. Her next shot felt like playing with a toy ray-gun when the D-cell batteries have died. She tossed the gun down, snatched her keys from her pocket and turned and ran for her car. Behind her, the tangle of mechanical squids unraveled themselves from the corpses, four of them now carrying some sort of gun and each with an attendant squid carrying the spare ammunition the police had been wearing.

Elizabeth hit the autostart button and the engine roared into life as she frantically sprinted for the DB9. As she drew near it, she heard the splatter of automatic fire chew up the ground behind her heels and felt something wrap around her left hand as she pumped it behind her, trying to make her legs work faster. She reached the driver's door, realized that one of the things was wrapped around her forearm and that its grinding teeth were gouging tracks into her clothes and flesh. She dropped her keys, wrenched the door open and thrust her hand between it and the jam. She slammed the door shut twice, hard, and the thing twitched and spasmed. She shook it off her hand and threw herself into the driver's seat, slamming the gear stick into drive and pressing the accelerator to the floor. The door banged against the twisted jam as she sped away, spraying gravel behind her.

She risked a glance in the rear view mirror – there was a small horde of the things following her, the two with the submachine-guns deftly and swiftly reloading even as the two with the pistols emptied their magazines at her. She winced and ducked as a bullet hit the rear window, crazing the glass. A split second later, the drumming clatter of full-auto fire turned the window to confetti and sprayed the inside of the car with cubes of safety-glass. She winced and kept her head down and her foot to the floor.

Experimentally, she flexed her fingers and clenched her muscles – nothing broken, but there were rips in her clothes and skin, blood leaking onto the leather of her upholstery. Beside her, the door flapped back and forth, unable to close against the damaged jam.

The things – she had absolutely no idea what they were, nor why they spoke Latin, nor why they wanted to kill her – were closing on her. The other cars that were getting in her way were checking her speed, forcing her to swerve around them, sometimes smashing into them and sending them skidding off the road. One of her pursuers squirted itself forward, wrapping its tentacles around the door frame and pushing them into the car, steel lamprey mouths flickering over her shoulder and hair.

She snarled a curse, saw that more of them were grabbing onto the car, and hauled the wheel to the side. The heavy car drifted through a sharp curve, and she just let the machine slide – slamming itself against a wall with a rending crash of steel and stone. The thing was trapped between the DB9 and the building, its head being crushed and smoking fragments of diseased brain splattering over the window. The door crunched shut with an ugly noise, a few severed tentacles left twitching spasmodically inside the car.

Others had latched themselves onto the car by now, a few of them shoving themselves through the shattered rear window, others wrapping themselves around the wing mirrors or sneaking under the engine and transmission. She snarled as the ones with the guns leveled their weapons at her, slamming the accelerator to the metal. The car howled, something under the bonnet screaming as one of the things caught in a belt or piston or whatever, and it jerked forward as hot lead splattered against the bodywork and glass. Behind her, the things that had crawled into the car clattered out of it as she accelerated away – only one that had managed to wrap a tentacle around the passenger-side headrest staying inside.

She had one goal in mind – a goal informed by the fact the things had identified her as mater oraculum; to get to Edmund Michael and protect him, if she possibly could. He spent Monday mornings at a pre-school group at Immaculate Conception. She hauled the wheel to the right, turning north onto Vauxhall Bridge. The car drifted, the engine braking coming later than she had expected, and she slammed broadside into a white van. Glass and coachwork shattered and creaked, scattering fragments over the tarmac surface of the road. The windscreen of the car crazed and partially cracked, one corner popping free.

There were screams and chaos on the roads now – glass and oil mingling on the hot black surface, cars spinning out and crashing into the railings on either side of the bridge. There were sirens in the air – the flashing blue lights and two-tone howling that demanded attention. Elizabeth braced her arms against the wheel and shot out onto the bridge proper, the Thames churning underneath her.

The things clinging to her car were pushing their tentacles under the bonnet now, into the fissures that had opened up where the bodywork was twisted from the impacts of other cars into hers. She watched with dismay as pieces of wire were pulled from the engine, a few torn lengths of hose and oil-black pieces of metal. The things almost seemed to be mocking her as they writhed around, as if displaying the guts of her car as macabre trophies.

Ahead of her, the bridge was blocked with a chevron of police cars – a wall of black and white bodywork and flashing blue light. Behind the cars, the officers themselves crouched – in black body armor and with heavy bullpup rifles in their hands. For a split second, she wondered what to do – and even if she would have enough time to actually stop before she barreled into the roadblock.

And then the bonnet of her car popped up, some latch forced by the forest of tentacles exploring her car's innards. Next to her, the thing twittered and buzzed excitedly as it reached for her face, even as she heard the guns of the police open up with a metallic staccato bark.

She swore expansively, grabbing the thing by the base of its tentacles, her forearm jammed into the writhing mass of metal worms, and reached for the hand brake. With a quick prayer, she punched the thing into the already weakened glass of the windscreen and pulled the brake lever as hard as she could, dropping her shoulder and closing her eyes.

The car abruptly slowed with a howl of brakes and the smoking smell of burnt metal. The metallic head of the monster saved her hand from being cut to ribbons as it plunged through the glass. And then the car slammed into the roadblock with a horrible rending noise of screaming metal and yelling men, and her body hit the windscreen and it burst free. Her momentum carrying her, she rolled through the front of the car and into the raised bonnet.

Her weight sent it crashing down onto the engine, trapping buzzing squids amid the racing engine's innards, and she rolled through a holocaust of shattered glass. She tumbled over the bonnet and then over the panda cars that were the roadblock. She felt her flesh bruise and lacerate as she bashed against unidentified bits of metal and glass was driven into her skin. With a crunch, she landed onto the ground in an unceremonious heap, half-conscious and with the thing wrapped around her hand twitching spasmodically and reaching for her.

She came back to full awareness as someone kicked it off her hand and shot it though the head with the deafening report of a rifle close to her ear. There was something unmistakably cold and heavy pointed just behind her right ear, and a heavy metal bracelet was being fastened on her left wrist.

Before her hand could be pulled behind her to meet her other wrist, there were cries of surprise from above her, a scream of pain and an awful wet cracking noise. She rolled over, to see a figure in black standing above her, his face a mask of dreadful tight-lipped concentration yet with the moist redness of recent tears in his eyes.

It was Susan's chauffeur. He had grabbed the barrel of the gun that was pressed to her skull and savagely twisted, folding the officer's arm back on itself with a snapping of bone. “What the . . . ?” exclaimed another officer as Neil extended his arms and two pistols sprang into his hands from his sleeves. He spun the guns in his hands, gripping them by the barrels and hefting them like clubs.

And then he went to work, fighting with a fluid, balletic grace that even Elizabeth could not understand enough of to properly admire. He was standing over her, striking with the butts of his guns, beating the police back and away, never wasting the effort or energy that would be needed to kill or disable them, keeping them off balance. The police were shouting and grunting in pain, falling back with blood bursting from impact traumas, ribs and cheekbones cracked and fractured. They had riot batons and tasers in their hands now, six of them fighting against him and loosing. His guns flashed and boomed, the shots being directed not at the police, but at the things that still hovered and writhed around them, each bullet blasting a floating squid from the sky in a shower of sparks.

A heavy, tight ratcheting noise as someone shucked a shotgun – an inch-wide steel tube was pointing at Elizabeth's temple. “Drop it!” the officer on the other end howled. “Drop the guns now!”

Before Neil could react, Elizabeth was in motion. She kicked upwards, the point of her boot smashing under the cop's armored jacket and slamming accurately between his legs. As he heeled over, groaning in pain, she grabbed the shotgun and vaulted back to her feet. “I'm not a bloody defenseless female!” she screamed, “I'm the heroine of the damn story!” She pointed the gun at one of the things diving for her and blew it out of the sky in a shower of razor-sharp metal fragments.

Around Neil, the police slumped to the ground, eyes glazing and bodies bruised. Neil – unwounded but for a split lip that stood out crimson against his pale skin – span like a clockwork solider for a few moments, blasting more of the things from the sky. Wisely, those left chose to pull back, but doubtless regrouping for a second assault. Elizabeth shucked a new round into the chamber, and looked with wonder at her savior.

There were tears lurking on the edge of him; his face tight-eyed with managed grief. “Are you uninjured?” he asked her. There was an edge in his accent she hadn't noticed before – central European, possibly northern Italian or Swiss. She nodded, but feeling the fragments of glass tinkle through her hair and blood trickle down her brow.

He dropped the magazines from his guns and then flexed his wrists, twisting them so that their butts pointed towards his sleeves. Some mechanism in his coat pushed a reload into place with a soft click, and then he jerked his arms and the guns themselves vanished. Elizabeth took in the scene with an amazed and shocked glance – the bridge was covered in scattered car accidents, spilled petrol burning greasily in the mid-morning air, glass flashing like lost diamonds on the road. There was a fire under the bonnet of her car, the engine still racing, and as she watched the fire reached the fuel pump and it exploded in a red and orange fireball. She and Neil winced and shielded their eyes from the rain of burning paint and hot glass. Well, she thought grimly, at least I didn't drive it off the bridge. Around them, the groans of the injured mingled with the crackle of flames and the distant sound of sirens. Neil turned to her, carefully pulling fragments of glass from her hair and pressing a cloth covered in something that stung her wounds to the cuts. “Miss Pevensie informed me in her letter that you would require assistance,” he said tautly. “She explained a number of things.”

Elizabeth looked at him in wonder – slim and lean and young, with a fierce determination radiating from him and trained to fight to a degree she might have not believed possible had she not seen men like Peter and Edmund. “What did she tell you?” she asked. He shook his head.

“I am not at liberty to tell you, Mrs Studdock,” he said formally. He scanned the horizon, hearing the wail of sirens approaching and knowing that the writhe of tentacles was not far away. “Nor do we have time – you must go.” Elizabeth lowered her head, blinking tears away as the realization of grief managed to push its way through the otherworldly insanity of the day.

“Susan is dead,” she said softly, “killed by those things. I . . . I thought you should know.” She looked up, Neil's eyes were glittering with tears. He nodded.

“She is foremost of those that I would hear praised . . .” he began, his voice cracking. And then he swept a hand brusquely over his eyes, shaking his head. “I will talk no more of books or the long war,” he said flatly and obliquely. He flicked his head. “Go! Defend your son!” Around them, the terrain was beginning to crawl with glinting metallic shapes that flashed in the sun. He jerked his hands and the guns appeared again with a snap of springs. Elizabeth stooped, hauling a motorcycle upright whose rider had skidded and crashed on the bridge. The engine was still running, the hot exhaust making the spilled oil and tar of the road smoke. And then she stopped and looked at him.

“Who are you?” she asked. He smiled and shook his head.

“Come now, Mrs Studdock – no-one is ever told any story but their own.” And then he raised his hands as a horde of metallic squids burst from cover and fire boomed from his fists. Elizabeth threw one leg over the motorbike and twisted the accelerator, laying a long S of melted rubber on the road, and raced over the bridge. Behind her, the staccato bark of gunfire lasted at least until the noise of honking Pimlico traffic drowned it out.

She drove fast as she could, leaning into the bike, steering with her bodyweight more than the handlebars, taking risks and jumping lights. She risked glances in the mirror – there didn't seem to be anything following her, but that could have just been the distance and her speed.

Unless they know where I am going and are taking a shortcut, she mused grimly. She twisted the accelerator again and felt the kick of speed in the strain across her shoulders and bruised forearms. She flashed through Victoria, skirted the eastern edge of Belgravia and howled through Hyde Park Corner leaving swearing and horns in her wake. As she tore up Park Lane at well over one hundred miles an hour, the wind whipped at her eyes and hair, dragging tears from the former and glass from the latter. Sirens were howling behind her as she skidded through the right hand turn onto Upper Brook Street, damn the lights and the Hell with the speedometer.

She drove through traffic, weaving around swerving cars. As she zoomed over the south-bound side of the dual carriageway, an articulated lorry slammed on the brakes, trying to stop and avoid crashing into her. It wasn't going to manage it – she hauled the handlebars over to the right and leaned. The bike slammed down on the pavement and – in a shower of sparks and with inches to spare – slid at about fifty miles an hour under the body of the truck. She jerked the machine upright, ignoring the pieces of gravel that had been flicked into her face and zoomed towards Grosvenor Square.

She burst through an American checkpoint like it wasn't there, howling past it before the police officer could even raise his hand to make her stop. She drove across the square itself, in defiance of all bylaws – posted or not – cutting from the north west to south eastern corner. She roared down Carlos Place, bringing the bike to a smoking halt and a shower of gravel that pattered against the leaded glass of the cloister of the Church on Mount Street. She was off the bike in a second, sprinting as well as her battered muscles would allow her towards the door. She crashed through the heavy oak and ran into the building, instinctively stopping to dip her fingertips in the holy water by the door, make the sign of the cross and genuflect.

It was the pause in her head-long flight that gave her the split second she needed to take in the memorial that was part of the side-altar. The whole thing was only a foot across, carved from blue-gray marble veined with red and white threads. It depicted patient wolves standing grieving around the silent corpse of a young man, dressed as a crusader, being cradled in the paws of a lion. Both the boy and the lion bore identical knife wounds on their chests, and the eyes of the wolves were inlaid with amber. A brass plaque – suspiciously clean, and which Elizabeth suspected would yield Susan's fingerprints – was set into the stone. In beautiful copperplate script, the following words were etched;

Of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul of Edmund Pevensie 1930-1949

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

In an expensive silver frame, in front of which was lying a single red rose cut that very day, there was an old photograph, black and white and yellowing with age, of a young man, standing in the courtyard of the Church, his face full of promise – Elizabeth knew enough of the Jesuits to recognize a Candidate for the Novitiate.

There was no mistaking it – the boy in the photograph was Edmund Pevensie. Older, certainly, than she had known him in Narnia, but unquestionably the same person. Grief took Elizabeth and shook her like a rat – to see Susan die and to be reminded that the rest of her family had died in a senseless accident was just too cruel.

All of this happened in a moment, and then she realized that while the boy she had wished could have been her son was dead, the same thing might very well happen to her own child if she did not move. She span on her heel and moved into the Church proper, only to be met by the tall pastor of Immaculate Conception, his bright eyes twinkling above his neatly-trimmed beard. “Elizabeth?” he asked her, taking in her torn clothes and dozens of superficial wounds. “Whatever is the matter?”

She did not waste time on preliminaries. “Where is my son?” she asked. The priest looked puzzled.

“He'll be in the parish hall, Elizabeth – is there something wrong?” Before she could answer, a sickening noise cut through the Church – the sound of shattering glass and wailing children. She didn't answer him, but set off at a run across the nave of the Church, running towards the door that lead to the parish hall, snatching a heavy brass candlestand up as she did so. She was about to wrench the door open when it burst open and what seemed like a tide of screaming children ran past her.

They knocked her backwards, their little star-shaped hands grabbing at her legs, wild-eyed with terror. She pushed a couple of them aside, and then shouldered aside their teacher and her two teenage aides who were screaming just as much as the kids, if not more. “Out of my way!” she yelled, “Out of my way!”

It was the same sort of things as before – seemingly dozens of them. They had smashed through the window of the classroom, upsetting the whiteboard and the wooden model of Noah's Ark. Boxwood pairs of animals were still bouncing, two by two, on the floor. Elizabeth hefted the heavy candlestand and whacked the first of the things in the head. It sparked and smashed into the wall, the corner of the base crushing its skull. She reversed her grip and – as a writhing tide of the things pushed her back into the Church – pinned another through the eyes to a beautifully carved wood and gilt side-altar.

The rest of them – realizing that she was the threat – sprang for her. The point of the candlestand was transfixing the Immaculate Heart of Mary, trapped there, and a forest of tentacles wrapped themselves around her hands, prising her fingers off the metal. Their sheer weight of numbers was simply too great, and the children weren't helping with their screaming and wailing. Her legs were immobilized, one arm trapped. She could see – through the haze of writhing metal – the priest and teacher trying to get the children away, and a couple of the monsters concentrating on Edmund Michael, wrapping their tentacles around his limbs, claws snapping for his eyes and throat.

Rage and desperation lent her strength and she shook her arm free. But there were just too many of them – a writhing mass of constricting steel snakes was around her throat, cutting oxygen off from her brain and muscles. She was weary and grief-stricken – she just didn't have enough left to give.

“Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit,” she meant to say, but her sensual lips smoothly articulated different words. “Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend me in battle . . .”

A tearing sensation as a truth-sharp sword passed between realities in a slash of light of a nameless color, and a figure appeared standing on the right side of the altar, tall and well-made, his naked flesh glowing bronze and alabaster, clothed only in hologram-colored wings that wrapped around him and veiled his burning eyes.

He raised his hand in a gesture of banishment or censure. Metal melted and vaporized, the air filling with the glutinous, clean scent of heated steel and brass. In a haze of burning iron, the things turned to wisps of metallic smoke, searingly hot for a moment and then swept away with the scentless, chill air that comes from out of the cloud on Sinai. Silence fell, the children stopped screaming, and the priest crossed himself in frank amazement.

As when a scroll is rolled together, the figure turned to face the stunned and terrified Elizabeth.

“Do not be afraid,” said the Archangel of War.

A/n : Okay, this is the end of part I! A few minor notes;

The words on Edmund's memorial are from the first chapter of the Book of Jeremiah.

As is common throughout my work, this chapter makes a lot of references to other things, and contains a number of “in-jokes” at it were. There will be a special prize of knowing you are clever to anyone who can notice any or all of them! As a small clue, the words Neil quotes are from a poem – by who, you will have to find out for yourself!

As can clearly be seen, this is a science fiction story. Sorry if you were expecting something else! I am trying to convey a sort of 1950s sci-fi element to the story proper, but this early section is obviously set in a version of “now” and therefore the 1950s touches are less obvious.