Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

I shook my head and took another drink.

He lit a cigar and blew out smoke. “Look, old son.” He put tin and lighter back into his pocket. “Let’s not beat around the bush, eh? The pig’s gone. Now Rex will have to rely on local news.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Maybe Rex will be able to get his hands on some scabby sheep off the moors,” he went on. “The odd rabbit. How’s that going to help you? No national or international news, the advertisers are going to abandon ship.”

It was, unfortunately, a perfectly accurate summing-up of the Globe’s prospects. I drank some more of my lager and lime and wished I’d gone straight home.

“So how about you come and work for me?”

I snorted beer down my nose. Liam watched me with detached interest while I coughed and gasped for breath, then he said, “You’re a good lad. I’ve always liked your style. There’s a deputy’s chair waiting for you at the Chronicle.”

I mopped my face with my hankie. “I’d rather have my balls bitten off by a horse, Liam,” I said, half-laughing with surprise at the offer. “I wouldn’t work under you if you were the last editor on Earth.”

He didn’t get angry. He just became very still. “You won’t remember what you were like when you arrived here,” he told me calmly. “You were lucky we didn’t just take you out onto the Manchester Road and leave you there.”

I looked at him, trying to decide whether to punch him or not.

“You weren’t even human when Lenny Hammond found you out on the moors,” he went on. “Just an animal dressed in rags.”

I stood up.

“You want to try and work out which side of your bread the butter’s on,” Liam continued. “We’ve been good to you. Rex has been good to you. But you’re a good journalist and you owe this place more than staying with the Globe as it goes down.”

I turned to go.

“I’m trying to turn this village into the centre of news-gathering for the whole North of England,” he said. “It’ll put us on the map, give us a lot of clout. And you could help me do that. I’m offering you a chance to do that.”

I took a single halting step. Then another one. The next one came easier, and the next, and by the time I was through the door and out on the pavement it was no trouble at all to walk away from Liam’s offer. He was like a radio station; the further away from him you were, the weaker his message became, until finally you couldn’t hear him at all.

Liam and Rex were locked in a duel to the death. They pretended it was about who ran the better paper, but it was really about Alice, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much if it hadn’t been for the Crash.

I had missed the Crash. Those who saw it said it was like a swarm of tiny black flies on their monitor screens, or a driving hailstorm, or a slowly-blossoming flower. Nobody knew where it came from, or who had written it, but the Crash blew through every firewall on Earth as if they weren’t there. It took down economies, destroyed telecommunications networks, and effectively ended the War, all in about twenty minutes.

There was chaos, of course, and I missed all that too. When I finally came round, that day in Rex’s office, the elves had already come out of their millennia-long exile and had simply taken over the country.

Well, no. That’s not exactly true; they didn’t simply take over the country. They put the country to the sword. They killed hundreds of thousands of people; they laid waste to towns and cities. They forbade us to have internal combustion and mains electricity and telecommunications and a Government and, for reasons which escaped everyone, a music industry. The Crash and the chaos that attended the end of the War brought us to our knees, and they were never going to let us get to our feet again.

We waited for the rest of the world to notice our plight and come to our rescue, but the rest of the world had its own problems. The United States were no longer united; California was just the wealthiest nation in a continent of intermittently-warring countries. It was going to be another decade at least before Continental Europe emerged from what, by all accounts, was a bizarre Dark Age. Australia and New Zealand had come through the Crash pretty well, but only a die-hard optimist would have held their breath waiting for help from that quarter. We were all alone, trapped on an island with countless twitchy sylvan psychopaths.

Bizarrely, there were some compensations. For instance, it turned out that magic actually worked.

Well, maybe not magic per se, but all that weird fringe stuff like crystal ball-gazing and tealeaf-reading and palmistry and astrology and cutting open animals and reading the future in their entrails.

It turned out, in those days following the elvish Occupation, that these things always had worked. They just never worked as ways of foretelling the future. What no one had ever cottoned on to was that they all told you what was happening, or what had happened, somewhere in the world. This of course was useless, unless you were a journalist, where explaining what’s happening or what has already happened is part of the art.

The elves thought it was really funny that we had got it so wrong for so many years. They thought it was so funny that it was the only form of communication they allowed us to use. You could find yourself flayed to death for trying to start a local postal service, but the elves smiled benignly on you if you started reading animal entrails.

It was one of those fields of endeavour where size really does matter. The interior of a rabbit, read by an expert, might, at a pinch, tell you what was going on in London. A pig would give you access to some random gossip and hard news from across the Atlantic. Cut open a cow, however, and the world was your oyster. The guts of an oyster might, if you were lucky, give you a clue to where you left your favourite socks.

That was how the Chronicle had scored over us, over and over again. After years and years as a national newspaperman, Liam had inherited a farm so enormous that it seemed obscene to describe it as a smallholding. He had access to hundreds of cattle, seemingly thousands of pigs, and uncountable numbers of chickens. Liam’s animals gave the Chronicle access to news the Globe could only dream about.

Some people were better at it than others. Rex wasn’t bad, but only the best-intentioned critic would have described him as an expert at reading the entrails of recently-deceased animals.

Alice, on the other hand, was an absolute star. When Alice left Rex and moved in with Liam, the Chronicle became, in its way, as well-informed as any national newspaper had been in the days before the Crash. Alice could slaughter a chicken and ask it any question you wanted, and the geometries of its guts would tell you the answer.

And that, in the end, was what this stupid little war was about. Rex wanted Alice back, and he thought that if he just kept going she would, in time, realise she’d made a mistake and had gone off with the wrong bloke. It wasn’t the most bizarre situation I had ever seen, but it was up there in the Top Five.

“Liam just tried to sign me up,” I said.

Rex looked up from his desk. He’d had a bath and changed his clothes and slapped on some aftershave to try and cover the residual smell of pig’s blood, but if I was a betting man I would have been putting money on him scrubbing himself raw for the next week to get rid of the stink.

“Liam’s always trying to sign up my staff,” he said, going back to the page of copy he’d been reading when I came in. “He tried to sign up Harry last month.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Harry threatened to kill him if he ever did it again.”

“I just thought you should know.”