Tom Sharpe - Riotous Assembly

Not that anything struck him physically. It was worse than that. There was an almost spiritual quality about the scream that exploded in his damaged ear, and about the appallingly crooked and malignant shape that suddenly loomed above him. He couldn't see what it was. He knew only its disgusting breath and with it a banshee yell, malignant beyond belief, and coming, he had no doubt at all, from the very depths of hell. Any doubts Luitenant Verkramp had entertained about the story of the bewitched bush disappeared in a trice, and in another trice Verkramp, hurling himself sideways, dropped into the very pit of hell he suspected the scream came from.

Lying impaled on the iron spikes at the bottom of the haha, his screams echoing across the Park, Luitenant Verkramp, half dead with fear and pain, stared upwards and knew himself eternally damned. In his delirium he saw a face peer down into his grave, a face diabolically satisfied: the face was the face of Els. Luitenant Verkramp passed out.

His two companions had by that time reached the foot of the hill. They had fled, leaving behind them not only the Luitenant but a trail of leaves, branches, helmets, and all the impedimenta of their profession. They need not have hurried. The news of the encounter had preceded them. Konstabel Els' yell, terrible even _diminuendo,_ had wafted like some fearful confirmation of doom to the cars that still jammed the Vlockfontein road.

The policemen lounging by the lorries and armoured cars grew rigid at its import. Men who had been erecting some of the rabies and bubonic plague billboards stopped work and stared into the darkness trying to make out what new horror had sprung from the deadly bush. Even the guard dogs cringed at the sound. And in the middle of Jacaranda Park, Kommandant van Heerden, in terror of his life from the Ming, halted involuntarily at the sound. No one who heard that scream was ever likely to forget it.

If Konstabel Els had been astounded at the effect of the elephant gun, he was even more astounded at the results of his experiment in psychological warfare. His imitation of the awakened dead had borne fruit among his vegetable enemies to an extent he wouldn't have believed possible, but as he stood listening to the ebbing screams from the ditch, a momentary shadow of doubt crossed his mind. There was something about those screams, something about their tone that was vaguely familiar. He went over to the haha and peered down, and was just able to make out through the foliage that covered it, a face, and again there was something familiar about the face. If it hadn't been for the bulbous nose and the puffed-up cheeks, he might have thought it was Luitenant Verkramp down there. He grinned to himself at the thought of the Luitenant lying on those spikes. Serve the bastard right if he had been down there for keeping him hanging around all night when he should have been relieved hours ago, he thought as he entered the blockhouse.

He took another swig of brandy and was just putting the bottle back in his hip pocket when he heard a sound that sent him hurrying to the gun port. Something was coming up the road. Some vehicle, and a touch of familiarity caught his ear. It sounded for all the world like a Saracen armoured car. 'About bloody time too,' Els thought, as the headlights swung round the corner and lit up for a second the bodies lying on the hillside opposite. A moment later a fresh light was thrown on the scene. A searchlight probed through the night and turned the privet hedge into one brilliant spot in an otherwise dark world.

'All right, you bastards, enough's as good as a fucking feast,' Els yelled into the night, and before he could say more the privet hedge began to disintegrate around his shelter. As the bullets tore into the blockhouse walls and the gun port was aflame with tracer bullets, Els knew that he was about to die. This wasn't the relief he expected. In one last desperate move to avert tragedy, Konstabel Els aimed the elephant gun at the armoured car. He held his fire until the Saracen was only ten yards from the gate and then pulled the trigger. Again and again he fired, and with a mixture of awe and satisfaction saw, silhouetted against the searchlight, the great armoured vehicle grind to a halt and begin to disintegrate. Its guns were silenced, its tyres were shreds of rubber and its occupants trickled gently but persistently through a hundred holes drilled in its sides. Only one man was even capable of trying to leave the thing and as he emerged convulsively from the turret-top, Els saw with appalling clarity the familiar uniform and cap of the South African Police. The body slumped back inside the turret, and Els, understanding dimly for the first time the enormity of his offences, knew himself but a stone's throw from the gallows. He fired his last shot. The searchlight exploded into darkness and Els, with desperate energy, gathered up all evidence of his recent occupation and stumbled out of the blockhouse and dragging his awful accomplice, sneaked off across the Park.

Behind him the armoured colander burst into flames and as Els hurled himself towards Jacaranda House the night sky was bright with the flames and the delicate tracery of exploding ammunition.

In Jacaranda House, Jonathan Hazelstone was singing in his bath. He was wearing a rubber bathing-cap to protect his delicate ears from the water, and partly because of the cap and partly because he was rather deaf, he was singing rather more loudly than he imagined. As a result he heard nothing of the noises of battle that accompanied his rendering of _Onward Christian Soldiers._ Around him the pink water eddied and swirled, assuming strange intricate patterns as the percussion of the elephant gun reached it. But Jonathan Hazelstone had no time for observing such trifles. His mind was preoccupied with his own shortcomings. Shame and a guilty pride at his own achievement mingled in his thoughts and over them both there hung the awful remembrance of things past.

He tried to put the dreadful business out of his mind but it came back insistently. Still, in spite of his remorse he had to smile to himself a little. After all, he thought, there couldn't be many men still alive who could say that they had done what he had and got away with it. Not that he was given to boastfulness, and he certainly was not going to go about broadcasting his deed. On the other hand he had been provoked quite horribly, and in the event he felt that his action had to some extent been excusable. 'Old Rhino Skin', he thought, and shuddered, and was about to remind himself that he must tell the cook never to use the beastly stuff for cooking again, when he remembered that there was in fact no cook to tell.

He looked sadly at the pink ring on the sides of the bath and then hurriedly got out and emptied the water. He sluiced the bath clean, refilled it and added bath salts and then lay down in the hot water to consider what to do next to erase the effects of the afternoon's events. He was faced, he knew, with a terrible problem. True, his sister had promised to make a full confession to the police and that was all right as far as it went, but it wasn't going to help him to escape scot-free. There were bound to be repercussions, and the whole episode was hardly calculated to help his career. It was a ghastly business altogether. Not that he had a great fund of sympathy for that damned cook. If it hadn't been for him, none of this would have happened. Besides, there were some things that Jonathan Hazelstone could never forgive. Perversion was one of them.

Kommandant van Heerden would have shared all these sentiments had he known about them, but by this time his faculties were all focused on one simple realization, that his career as a police officer and probably as a free man had almost certainly been ended by his handling of the Hazelstone Case. The explosion that heralded the end of the armoured car had made that clear as daylight to him. Disgraced, cashiered and convicted of being an accessory before, during, and after the murder of the policeman who had undoubtedly fallen before Els' tornado of gunshot at the main gate, he would share the rest of his life in prison with men who bore him debts of ingratitude no amount of suffering would ever repay. The day he entered Piemburg Prison might not be his last, but it would undoubtedly be his worst. Too many men had signed confessions after being tortured by Konstabel Els in the cells of Piemburg Police Station for him to relish the prospect of their company in prison.