Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

He looked up at me again, a fearsome-looking little gnome of a man with the sweetest nature of anyone I’d ever met. He sighed and pointed at the chair he kept for visitors. “Sit down.”

I sat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I was tempted.”

He thought about this confession for a few moments. “I can’t offer you any more money.” He clasped his hands in front of him on top of Harry’s copy. I knew it was Harry’s, even reading it upside-down, because it was full of commas. Harry put commas in everywhere; he just couldn’t help himself

“It’s not the money, Rex,” I said. “Why do you carry on? He’s got half the livestock in the county, he’s got thirty-odd journalists, he’s got that sodding steam-powered press, he’s got that witch —” I stopped. “Sorry.” ‘That witch’ was Alice.

He shrugged. “I’m not going to give up,” he told me. “Despite what I said earlier, we are going to keep on reporting the news until we absolutely cannot report the news any more. Even if we have to exist solely on local stories.”

“If we do that we’ll last about a fortnight,” I told him. “The advertisers will just go over to the Chronicle.”

He leaned forward. “If I have to pay for this paper out of my own pocket,” he said calmly, “this paper will continue to be published every Thursday.” He sat back. “We got some useful copy out of the pig; I think if we’re creative we can spin it out for another three or four issues. What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy, if you want the honest truth,” I told him. “You and Liam.”

He chuckled. “Go home. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’m doing Ernie Hazlewright’s funeral in the morning.”

Rex looked sadly at me and propped his chin on his hand. “I’m going to miss old Ernie,” he said. “He was a proper old lad. Fought in the Falklands. You make sure you do a good job on Ernie.”

I sat and looked at him and I felt my shoulders start to slump, the way they always did when we had conversations like this. The Globe was like a black hole; I could get out far enough to peek over the event horizon, but I couldn’t escape the gravity of its impending doom. Rex was going to ride the paper as it went down the tubes, and I was going to be sitting alongside him in the front seat.

It was a lovely Spring morning, fresh and cool. I could smell the dew-damp earth of the fields on either side of the road.

There were fifteen of us in the journalists’ pool, riding through the French countryside with a column of Alliance armour. The War was in its third year and it hadn’t gone nuclear yet, apart from places like Kiev and Istanbul. The Alliance was finally making some headway against the Union forces. Everyone felt pretty good.

A black and white road sign went past our humvee. On it was the name Ste. Ursule du Lac .

Only an optimist would have called this a village. It was just half a dozen houses and a school grouped around the Norman church of St Ursula. It was deserted.

The Union had something they called police battalions. They came in behind the fighting units, and when an area had been pacified, they were supposed to stay behind and make sure that law and order were restored.

That happened, sometimes. More often, the police battalions were just a euphemistic way of solving the knotty problem of what to do with an occupied and presumably annoyed civilian population. As the Union advance pressed westward to the Atlantic, they had left hundreds of empty villages in their wake. We’d been on the trail of this one particular battalion for a couple of days now.

Nobody was under any illusion that the Alliance forces were any better than the Union; there had been atrocity on both sides. But as journalists we knew which side our bread was buttered on. We were travelling with the Alliance; we were hardly going to file stories accusing them of human rights violations.

We pulled up in St Ursula’s little village square and dismounted from our various vehicles, stretching our legs. The Alliance had already come through here a few hours earlier and pronounced the coast clear, but soldiers fanned out to search the buildings while we journalists stood around smoking and chatting and doing pieces to camera. Someone unpacked a portable catalytic stove and brewed coffee. The smell drifted on the breeze.

I wandered away from the main group. None of the buildings in the village seemed to be damaged. There was no sign that the War had come this way at all. But there were no villagers. There wasn’t even a stray dog.

The school was a little way up the single street from the square. I lit a cigarette and put my hands in my pockets and walked up to it. It was white, and there was a little black bell mounted on a swivel over the front door. I walked up the steps. Someone behind me was shouting.

I looked over my shoulder. One of the Alliance officers was running towards the school, shouting something and waving his arms. It was the little ginger-haired major from New Brunswick, the one who claimed he’d worked on the Chicago Tribune before the War. We all thought he was a dickhead, and did our best to ignore him.

I turned back to the door, turned the handle, and pushed.

“Anyway,’ said the ugly little man on the other side of the desk, “it’s not very much, but it’s something.” He smiled awkwardly. “It’ll keep you off the streets.”

I looked around me and blinked hard. I said, “Did you just offer me a job?”

Somewhere, between pushing open the door of St Ursula’s school and waking up in Rex’s office, three years had passed. I didn’t know how I had returned from France. I didn’t know the War was over. I didn’t know the elves had taken control of Britain.

I had turned up in the village a week or so earlier, an animal dressed in rags, as Liam put it. The village council didn’t know quite what to do with this raving madman. They’d cleaned me up and fed me and, when I didn’t seem too dangerous, Rex offered to give me a job at the Globe’s offices, sweeping up and moving rubbish and stuff.

I didn’t know why I came out of it when I did. Maybe Rex said something that brought me back from wherever I had gone to hide.

I didn’t know what I saw when that school door swung open, but late at night, when I was lying in bed, terrible things beat on the thin walls of sleep, looking for me.

I opened my eyes.

There was a smell of burning in my bedroom.

I sat up. The light of a full moon was flooding in through the windows and falling on an elf which was sitting on the end of my bed smoking a spliff.

I shouted something and flopped back onto my pillows.

“You’re looking well,” said the elf. “Newspaper work obviously agrees with you.”

I said, “Did anyone see you come in?” Elves were not the most popular people in Britain. If anyone had seen this one enter my house the most optimistic thing I could look forward to would be a vigorous lynching.

It took a huge toke on the joint and blew out a stream of smoke that was silver in the moonlight. “It’s half past three in the morning,” it said. “Anyone out at this hour isn’t going to believe they saw me, even if they did. Which they didn’t.”

I sat up again and mashed the pillows down behind my back. The elf called itself 56K Modem. That wasn’t its real name, of course. The elves took whatever pleased them, including their names. Modem once told me its real name. It sounded like snow settling on a frosty road.

“What do you want?”

Modem tapped ash onto the floor. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

“Do you want one?”

“No. But I’m rather hurt you didn’t offer.”

Modem was wearing a collarless white shirt and jeans. Its feet were bare and its fine grey hair was bound into a metre-long rope. I rubbed my face to try and wake myself up. “What do you want?”