The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn't want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
And she held her sword, and she smiled like a knife.
There were a number of guns in that room, and slowly, tremblingly, they were focused on her chest, and her back, and head.
They encircled her completely.
"Don't move!" croaked Pedro.
Everybody else nodded.
Red shrugged. She began to walk forward.
Every finger on every trigger tightened, almost of its own accord. Lead and the smell of cordite filled the air. Red's cocktail glass smashed in her hand. The room's remaining mirrors exploded in lethal shards. Part of the ceiling fell down.
And then it was over.
Carmine Zuigiber turned and stared at the bodies surrounding her as if she hadn't the faintest idea of how they came to be there.
She licked a spatter of blood‑someone else's‑from the back of her hand with a scarlet, cat‑like tongue. Then she smiled.
And she walked out of the bar, her heels clicking on the tiles like the tapping of distant hammers.
The two holidaymakers climbed out from under the table and surveyed the carnage.
"This wouldn't of happened if we'd of gone to Torremolinos like we usually do," said one of them, plaintively.
"Foreigners," sighed the other. "They're just not like us, Patricia."
"That settles it, then. Next year we go to Brighton," said Mrs. Threlfall, completely missing the significance of what had just happened.
It meant there wouldn't be any next year.
It rather lowered the odds on there being any next week to speak of.
Thursday
T
here was a newcomer in the village.
New people were always a source of interest and speculation among the Them,[20] but this time Pepper had impressive news.
"She's moved into Jasmine Cottage and she's a witch," she said. "I know, because Mrs. Henderson does the cleaning and she told my mother she gets a witches' newspaper. She gets loads of ordinary newspapers, too, but she gets this special witches' one."
"My father says there's no such thing as witches," said Wensleydale, who had fair, wavy hair, and peered seriously out at life through thick black‑rimmed spectacles. It was widely believed that he had once been christened Jeremy, but no one ever used the name, not even his parents, who called him Youngster. They did this in the subconscious hope that he might take the hint; Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of forty‑seven.
"Don't see why not," said Brian, who had a wide, cheerful face, under an apparently permanent layer of grime. "I don't see why witches shouldn't have their own newspaper. With stories about all the latest spells and that. My father gets Anglers' Mail, and I bet there's more witches than anglers."
"It's called Psychic News," volunteered Pepper.
"That's not witches," said Wensleydale. "My aunt has that. That's just spoon‑bending and fortune‑telling and people thinking they were Queen Elizabeth the First in another life. There's no witches any more, actually. People invented medicines and that and told 'em they didn't need 'em any more and started burning 'em."
"It could have pictures of frogs and things," said Brian, who was reluctant to let a good idea go to waste. "An'‑an' road tests of broomsticks. And a cats' column."
"Anyway, your aunt could be a witch," said Pepper. "In secret. She could be your aunt all day and go witching at night."
"Not my aunt," said Wensleydale darkly.
"An' recipes," said Brian. "New uses for leftover toad."
"Oh, shut up," said Pepper.
Brian snorted. If it had been Wensley who had said that, there'd have been a half‑hearted scuffle, as between friends. But the other Them had long ago learned that Pepper did not consider herself bound by the informal conventions of brotherly scuffles. She could kick and bite with astonishing physiological accuracy for a girl of eleven. Besides, at eleven years old the Them were beginning to be bothered by the dim conception that laying hands on good ole Pep moved things into blood‑thumping categories they weren't entirely at home with yet, besides earning you a snake‑fast blow that would have floored the Karate Kid.
But she was good to have in your gang. They remembered with pride the time when Greasy Johnson and his gang had taunted them for playing with a girl. Pepper had erupted with a fury that had caused Greasy's mother to come round that evening and complain.
Pepper looked upon him, a giant male, as a natural enemy.
She herself had short red hair and a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.
Pepper's given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant‑y‑Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent‑trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune's marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper's mother returned to Pepper's surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)
There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and Pepper had chosen the other one: the three male Them had learned this on their first day of school, in the playground, at the age of four.
They had asked her her name, and, all innocent, she had told them.
Subsequently a bucket of water had been needed to separate Pippin Galadriel Moonchild's teeth from Adam's shoe. Wensleydale's first pair of spectacles had been broken, and Brian's sweater needed five stitches.
The Them were together from then on, and Pepper was Pepper forever, except to her mother, and (when they were feeling especially courageous, and the Them were almost out of earshot) Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites, the village's only other gang.
Adam drummed his heels on the edge of the milk crate that was doing the office of a seat, listening to this bickering with the relaxed air of a king listening to the idle chatter of his courtiers.
He chewed lazily on a straw. It was a Thursday morning. The holidays stretched ahead, endless and unsullied. They needed filling up.
He let the conversation float around him like the buzzing of grasshoppers or, more precisely, like a prospector watching the churning gravel for a glint of useful gold.
"In our Sunday paper it said there was thousands of witches in the country," said Brian. "Worshiping Nature and eating health food an' that. So I don't see why we shouldn't have one round here. They were floodin' the country with a Wave of Mindless Evil, it said."
"What, by worshipin' Nature and eatin' health food?" said Wensleydale.
20
It didn't matter what the four had called their gang over the years, the frequent name changes usually being prompted by whatever Adam had happened to have read or viewed the previous day (the Adam Young Squad; Adam and Co.; The Hole‑in‑the‑Chalk Gang; The Really Well‑Known Four; The Legion of Really Super‑Heroes; The Quarry Gang; The Secret Four; The Justice Society of Tadfield; The Galaxatrons; The Four Just Persons; The Rebels). Everyone else always referred to them darkly as Them, and eventually they did too.
21
Greasy Johnson was a sad and oversized child. There's one in every school; not exactly fat, but simply huge and wearing almost the same size clothes as his father. Paper tore under his tremendous fingers, pens shattered in his grip. Children whom he tried to play with in quiet, friendly games ended up getting under his huge feet, and Greasy Johnson had become a bully almost in self‑defense. After all, it was better to be called a bully, which at least implied some sort of control and desire, than to be called a big clumsy oaf. He was the despair of the sports master, because if Greasy Johnson had taken the slightest interest in sport, then the school could have been champions. But Greasy Johnson had never found a sport that suited him. He was instead secretly devoted to his collection of tropical fish, which won him prizes. Greasy Johnson was the same age as Adam Young, to within a few hours, and his parents had never told him he was adopted. See? You were right about the babies.