Over the next few days, the four prisoners loomed large in the village's conscience and its fears. Everybody knew what would happen to them but nobody knew what would have to be done with them. Dai Police had no cell, so they had to be kept in the safest place available – one of Jack Llewellyn's lock-up garages, which they made as comfortable and warm as they could for them.
Once Eileen had made sure that everyone in the forest camp was well and safe, she had come down to the village to offer her help to Dr Owen. The doctor, rushed off his none-too-young feet, was very grateful, not only because of the number of injured he had to attend to, but because Eileen was the only person with direct experience of handling Dust victims. Her advice was grim but inescapable: strait-jackets would have to be improvised as quickly as possible and they would have to be worn continuously from the third day. She insisted (which Dr Owen considered very brave of her) on explaining this to the four men herself. She softened the facts as much as she could; they knew that the Dust would drive them mad because they had been told so when Eileen's warning had first been passed to them – this had been essential, both to drive home the warning's importance and to prevent the unafflicted from being caught unawares. But in talking to the four, she deliberately gave the impression that this madness came in fits, intermittently, with periods of sanity in between and that the strait-jackets were needed because the fits were unpredictable and they might injure themselves and each other when they were seized by them. It would be more cruel than they could bear to tell them the whole truth, that very soon the madness would be continuous and without hope. They were sick enough and frightened enough, already.
She managed, she hoped, to persuade them and to keep her poise while she did so. But as soon as she was out of their hearing, and the lock-up door clanged down behind her, she burst into tears in Dr Owen's fatherly arms.
'I'm sorry, Doctor… I…'
'Don't you say that, Eileen fach. You were a bloody marvel and that's a fact. Have a good bawl now and be done with it.'
'But what's to become of them?'
'God alone knows, my dear. I daren't think of it or I'd weep myself. Come along now. Let's see how they're getting on with those damn jackets.'
Dai Police's wife Joan had organized a sewing party who were hard at work making the jackets from sail-cloth commandeered from a dinghy in somebody's back garden -a dinghy that would never sail on Lake Vyrnwy again, because Lake Vyrnwy was now a sea of mud with a stream in the middle. 'Feel as though we were plaiting hangmen's nooses, we do,' Joan said glumly but got on with it.
The strait-jackets were never used.
They were ready on the third day with Eileen growing increasingly nervous and impatient, but there had been delay in finding adequate thread. Dai Police, the doctor and Eileen set off for the lock-up with two strong men as escort in case of trouble. The escort carried shotguns; there had been a noticeable tendency, since the earthquake, for those who possessed them (as most families did, with so many rabbits and other game to hand) to keep them within easy reach. Carrying arms went against the grain with Dai Police; he had in his safe a.32 automatic and a hundred rounds of ammunition which had been handed in by the executors of a retired colonel, recently dead, but so far he had not overcome his reluctance to wear it.
When they reached the lock-up it was empty. The door had been smashed open from the inside.
For a moment nobody spoke; they all stood staring, perplexed and paralysed, at the ruined door. Then a faint call from the garage forecourt set them running to where Jack Llewellyn lay, bloodstained and half-stunned. Jack waved a feeble arm along the street and croaked, 'After them, for God's sake!' before he collapsed again.
The doctor cried, 'See to him, Eileen!' and the four men sprinted away up the road. It was just as well Eileen was occupied with attending to Jack's injuries, because it saved her from witnessing what followed.
They caught up with Tom Jenkins and the others outside the school. That Tom himself, and one of the valley men, were completely in the grip of the violent madness was obvious at once. The other two seemed disorientated and hesitant, as though they had been infected by the first two's madness and swept along by it, but were uncertain what was happening. All four turned to face their pursuers, glaring at them wild-eyed, and Tom gave a terrible wordless roar like a bull.
'Easy, now, Tom,' Dai said, with little hope of getting through to him, but feeling the attempt had to be made. 'Easy now. You know us. We want to help you, man.'
For a fraction of a second the eight of them were a frozen tableau – whether the madmen would attack or take flight seemed to hang in the balance. It was broken by the sound of children laughing and running.
Geraint Lloyd's contribution to the crisis, after the first day, had been to keep the school working and parents had been only too glad to have the children off their hands. Now, at just the wrong moment, a dozen of the younger ones poured out of the school door into the street.
The high-pitched clamour seemed to infuriate the madmen. Snarling, they turned on the children.
Dai and the others raced forward but Tom reached the children first, snatching up seven-year-old Becky Reece in his great hands, holding her at arms' length, roaring, crushing…
By chance, Becky's father was one of the escort. Without a word, he put his twelve-bore to Tom's head and fired.
The whole scene was over in seconds, but it stuck in Dr Owen's memory for the rest of his life. Geraint yelling to the children to come back in. Three more shots. The children's stampede back to the schoolhouse. The sudden silence. The four dead madmen in the village street. Becky's father, his gun dropped, clutching his bruised and weeping daughter, babbling reassurance to her.
They held a village meeting that evening. It did not last long; even the pale and shocked Rev. Phillips acquiesced in the decision, though by common consent he was excused from voting.
From that night, until the madness danger was known to be over, a rota of armed men would guard the approaches to the village from the valley. Dr Owen had described the symptoms of the madness in detail, though in fact they could not be mistaken. Healthy refugees would be admitted. Refugees with bronchial symptoms would be locked up in Jack Llewellyn's garage, which would be repaired next morning and made impregnable; they would not be released until the doctor had pronounced them clear.
Madmen – and madwomen, even mad children – would be shot on the spot, as both safety and mercy demanded.
Reality, even grimmer than the reality of the earthquake, had come to New Dyfnant.
In the forest, Peter O'Malley was facing a reality of his own and dealing with it single-handed. His employers, the Forestry Commission, had presumably ceased to exist and the statistical side of Peter's work had become too academic to continue. But the animals remained and one thing Peter had to know, even if only because human life and health might be involved – their reaction to the Dust. Peter and Father Byrne had become part of Dan and Moira's camp, moving Peter's trailer into the laager the day after the earthquake. But the others had been quick to understand the importance of what Peter had to do and he was excused all camp duties to get on with it.
Day by day, he roamed the forest, watching carefully. Birds and insects seemed completely unaffected by the Dust; so far, so good. Fish too; the camp had eaten several trout before it occurred to them that the fish might have taken in Dust from the water surface, and the eating of fish was immediately banned. But no one developed any symptoms and after a few days it was considered safe to lift the ban. This was a relief because although they had built up quite a stock of tinned and other preservable food in the cave, winter was coming and all fresh food was precious. The longer the cave stocks could be made to last, the better.