Courtesy of the lovely Webster, who gave me a prompt here, and whose matching (albeit much better) piece Let's Spend the Night Together you can find here.
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They fell from the Heavens like the wrath of God, and every man of
Woking fell to the ground in awe and terror. In their pain they roared like the
devils they surely were, battering our crops with their hot breath. Great wings
of smoke unfurled high into the sky, casting all of Surrey into shade. I’ll
admit, that did scare me, just a bit.
The priest cried that none should approach; that we must flee, or else
scourge ourselves in repentance. I don’t know if his own whipping helped his
soul, but I heard he fell dead a mile down the path, and landed face-down in a
ditch. Anyway, I never was one for priests. So I went to look.
Of course, after a lifetime of spouting nonsense about the French, the
King and the evils of wanking, just this once, he was only bloody right. The
common and the nearby wood were scourged dry, their airs choked with ash, and the
earth at the heart of the crater glowed like the Pit. Everything screamed to
stay away from that place, not least the thought of my Martha.
But if it’s the end, and you’re going to God anyway, you might as well
go doing something that’d annoy the wife.
After a while the smoke cleared, revealing some sort of great black
barrel. That’s a funny-looking devil, I thought, just in time for it to
crack open and disgorge something much more familiar. It spilled out
onto the ground, greyish, shapeless, and clearly in pain, and lay there panting
and moaning.
Now me, ever since that bloody business with the Cornish, I’ve had nightmares
about the sound of screaming. And that thing’s keening, let me tell you – it
might have been an enemy of God and King, a creature so vile that even a Frenchman
might rightly spit on it – but in that moment, I wanted to help it, even if just
to put it out of its misery.
Fortunately, I wasn’t forced to choose, because at that moment, a hundred
of the King’s Yeomen stamped up on their horses to kill it with halberds.
And then they told me to get lost, and because they had halberds, and
I’d just seen them kill a devil, I did.
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The dark cloud that settled over the land turned the days that followed
into one great long night. Cold and starving, grey with ash, we tried to get
the crops in, but the exodus from Guildford put paid to our harvest almost overnight.
That lot told us of greater monsters, stretching up past the treetops, glaring
with hate-fuelled eyes that burned men to dust. We must have been lucky – we only
got a little one.
Presently the story got round that I’d seen it, and people came to
hear the tale. Crowds gathered at my house, and when some little scrap from
Godalming called me ‘Sir John’, it stuck.
It wasn’t long after that – and it didn’t take much prompting – before
the story went round that I’d killed it. Well, that changed things. Men gave me
gifts, women gave me kisses, children gave me great teary hugs – and everyone, everyone,
looked to me for our next move.
Giant-killer or not, Sir John and his growing family of hundreds had
to eat. There was nothing left in Woking, so the dispossessed of the Last Days
of Surrey would have to run away. We settled on invading Berkshire; after all, there
had to be food in Reading. We’d work out what came next after that.
We were much surprised to find Reading missing, replaced with a great
field of thorny red weed. We slept fitfully beneath once-green hedges that
night, and by the morning, the distant Downs were bloody with it.
All the world turned to red, then. It grew like a great thick net, making
a chore of walking anywhere, trapping us in that ruined town. Panic spread,
tempers frayed, fists were thrown. And then, at the last moment, as violence
seemed certain, one ferocious voice shouted down both mobs. Martha, my Martha,
sitting on our eldest lad’s shoulders, bit into one of the bloody runners, and
declared it safe to eat.
And that’s how she became Lady Martha to our desperate followers, and
how we all became the blood-drinkers of New Reading Town.
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Life in Hell turned out to be much the same as life on Earth. Wake up,
say your prayers (perhaps with a certain new urgency), break your back to
gather up food, cook it ‘til you can stand the taste. We soon found the red
weed went with turnips, which was good, because bugger-all else had survived.
After a month or so, a few tattered soldiers came by to tell us there
was a new King. To our great surprise, it wasn’t Beelzebub, who presumably chose
Paris for his court – no, just the young Henry Fitzroy, the last Henry’s
bastard, the first bugger to reach the throne after the devils all started
dying of dropsy. Of all things, dropsy. The mind boggles.
Anyway, best of luck to him. The red weed died off in the winter, and
as the great and undisputed heroes of the hour, myself and the missus got made
Mayor and Mayoress. Not by the King, far away and pointless – but by our own
people, our own friends and family. That’s true honour, you know. So Mayor John
it was, and bollocks to anyone who said otherwise.
So that’s my story. The rest, you know, that’s just sweat and dirt.
Our Humphrey bought a flock and moved them out onto the Downs. Our Fulke lost
his sight and went off to be a monk. Agnes, Isobel, and little John – they’re
all well. So are the folk of New Reading, who we stumbled to safety with, when
Hell came to earth in the summer of… oh, fifteen thirty-something.
And that’s about the shape of it. God bless you and keep you, my
friend.
