The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

THE BLITZ SPIRIT by Kim Newman

The Shelter was already crowded when he arrived. A wedge of queue stood topside. Men in hats and wideshouldered double-breasteds and women with Cellophane raincoats over Austerity creations clustered and craned around the entrance. The ARP man on the door lifted the red velvet rope for Frankham without checking his clipboard. The queue muttered, but he gave a familiar wave. Most of the civvies recognized him. They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for his write-ups.

A barrage balloon caught the searchlight overhead, a low-lying and heavy cloud in December skies. From the depths, band music poured. Three shrills swung “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” He stood alone in the bare cage-lift as it descended. He was always given elbow room. It was a sign of respect.

Peter Frankham saw himself in the burnished metal of the cage, looking Nigel Patrick-ish, with thin ’tache and slouch hat, gabardine draped over his shoulders, double length of watch-chain in his waistcoat and ballooning bags. He’d had the look for three months and it wasn’t yet through.

The cage rattled open and a commissionaire let him into the Shelter proper.

“There was another bomb in Oxford Street,” someone said. “Shut down the tube for hours.”

“Don’t go on an’ on an’ on,” he said back.

The dance floor thronged. Surplus bods huddled in the dark by the walls, tucking into plates of snoek, drinking bombers. Noise was all around: chatter, swing, clatter, siren whines, shrills.

He had passed a stretch of rubble in Oxford Street. It might have been the His Master’s Voice shop. The wardens had it roped off and sludgy piles of debris gave off steam where fires had been put out. The whole street was blacked out, Christmas tat turned to sinister black shapes strung from lampposts.

Many in the crowd, men and women, wore uniform. Dancers had jackets undone, sweat-ringed as they jived and jitterbugged, knowing they could die any second. Chippies and touts worked the Shelter on a professional basis. Frankham could spot them a mile off. Time Out called him “Caesar of the Spivs.”

He had no business here. Once he had written a place up, everyone else would go and his actual attendance would be surplus to schedule. But he liked to make up inspections. Sometimes, he’d pick apart a hole he had built up. These were ephemeral times; nothing stood long. The music got faster.

The band—a young man in a flying helmet surrounded by his instrument panel, flicking switches—pin-balled through “Coming In On a Wing and a Prayer” and the three shrills were off, replaced by a geezer with a painted tie that hung to his knee, an hour-glass-shaped purple coat, and a cigar twice the size of the Old Man’s.

The dancers collapsed exhausted and crowds surged in to fill their space. The band went oom-pah and the geezer wheezed through impersonations of Benito and Adolf, topping off his sound-bite of an act with “Der Fuhrer’s Face.” The audience knew the routine, and joined in the chorus.

“When der Fuhrer says ‘We iss der Master Race,’

“We HEIL—”

An enormous collective oral wet fart resounded.

“HEIL—”

Again.

“Right in der Fuhrer’s face…”

The Shelter was on its last legs, Frankham thought. Retro was all very well, but it shaded too easily into camp.

He left without even sampling his complimentary drink. Outside, as the doors opened, an all-clear sounded.

About eleven, he stopped by Monty’s for a coffee-shock. He wrapped a five pound note in his ration coupon and got the real stuff. Black market, with five sugars. The brush-mustached orderly gave Frankham a smart salute and stomped off on a shrapnel-stiff leg.

“Bit of a prang last month,” he had explained as he plonked down Frankham’s mug, sloshing a bit too much in the saucer.

Monty’s was in the warrens of Soho, just across from the Windmill. From his place at the counter, Frankham could see the frontage. An audience disgorged from all exits, having just seen Tonight and Every Night. Many were whistling the hit, “Seeing It Through.” The revue was doing better business than Hello Playmates! at the Dominion. There was a quote from Frankham on the marquee: “It’s tickety-boo!”

A child-sized figure in a gas mask, trailing a filthy foot of grown-up coat, crept in behind a punter, and started rooting around in the neglected corners. The orderly gave an “Oi, you!” and shooed the creature out.

“Kids,” he said, “bless ’em.”

A professional foreigner was mouthing off at a corner table, surrounded by nodding acolytes as he dipped biscuits in his tea. He had a Viennese beard and a dubious accent.

“Looking backward is a comprehensible but perilous reaction to the chaos of the present,” Johnny Foreign declaimed. “Faced with the direst circumstances, it is sometimes natural to wish to return to a time when similar hardships were endured only to be overcome…”

Frankham couldn’t help but smile. Johnny Foreign was the spit and image of the sinister, sneaky figures on the framed posters behind the bar. CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. A definite morale-breaker and no mistake.

A bald little man sidled up to Frankham at the counter and opened his ratty Bud Flanagan coat. His many inside pockets were distended with compact 78s and wire-tape cassettes.

“Slightly bomb-damaged stock,” he whispered out of a corner of his mouth. “Coupon or cash.”

He had all the sounds: George Formby, Hutch, Gracie Fields, Madonna’s Blitzkrieg, the Yank crooners, Hoagy.

Frankham waved the looter away. His wares still had gummy circles where price stickers had been. He went to tap Johnny Foreign’s table and made an exchange with one of the acolytes for an Artie Shaw bootleg.

A family of refugees was holding up foot traffic on Wardour Street. The police were checking papers with some trouble. None of the adults spoke any English, and a sullen, bone-weary schoolgirl was having to translate to her three apparent parents, converting terse British sentences into lengthy Mittel Europa circumlocutions.

The street was blocked off by a checkpoint. Frankham shivered in his gabardine and slipped on his phones, adjusting the wire cassette until swing plugged directly into his brain. The Glenn Miller remix fed his jumping synapses. Pennsylvania 6-5,000.

“Pass on, please,” said a constable, waving pedestrians by. Soldiers in berets that seemed black in the night shoved the refugees against a wall and patted their pockets for contraband. The Herald had run an expose, indicting bogus refugees as the worst of the black marketeers.

Somewhere, far away, perhaps across the river, was the crump of a big explosion. Another one.

Frankham strode on. He was behind schedule.

The War Room wasn’t as overpopulated as the Shelter. It was more expensive and coupons were short since the bank freeze. But after his write-up, it would be the Next Place.

Frankham sipped a reasonable cocktail and leant backward on the bar-rail with proprietorial insouciance. The dance floor was a map of the European theater. Hostesses with pointers shoved toy ships and model troop dispositions about. They wore khaki skirts and had their hair done up under peaked caps. They all had sex appeal in buckets.

The Old Man himself, or rather a working simulacrum thereof, sat on the bandstand, bulging his boiler suit like a giant baby, puffing on a jutting cigar, and sampling famous sayings into nonstop swing.

“We shall fight them… fight them… fight them…”

A black couple in US army uniform combined acrobatically, the man standing on Belgium and lifting his scissor-legged partner over his head, vaulting her from Normandy Beach to Peenemunde. Her skirts divided and closed like a snapping trap.

“… on the beaches… the beaches… the beaches…”

The dancers were probably with the management. They were too good to be civvies.

Everyone was given a cigar as they came in. Frankham had dumped his in a bucket of sand, but plenty lit up, adding to the smoke-filled room fug that hung under the ceiling, obscuring the lights.

The specialty dancers reached a frenzied climax, dry-humping and rolling across France like the Eighth Army. The Old Man turned a blubbery cartwheel on the bandstand, padding wriggling. Dresden exploded in a three-foot flame which whooshed around the legs of dancers, blowing up skirts to reveal suspenders and camiknickers. Harmless miniature fire-bursts sparked all around, singeing a few, producing squeals of drunken delight.

“Never before… I said before,” the Old Man rumbled like a public school Foghorn Leghorn. “In the field of human conf… I said human conflict, has so much, and I mean sooooo much, been owed…”

In a sense, Frankham reflected, it was all owed to him.

Frankham had seen it coming a year or so back, when the first big-band tracks leaked into the clubs just as the PM was denying plans had been laid to reintroduce rationing. He had written about it in cutting-edge ’zines, then the overground press. The Blitz Spirit was returning in style. When the Austerity line of fashions hit shops just as the bombing campaign shifted from public transport to department store, the battle to stay in fashion racked up its first casualties and more eager recruits enlisted. “Theme Museums” offering realistic simulacra of the darkest hours opened, bombarding the civvies with special effects. Hair salons became barbers’ shops, and stylists became skilled in straight-razoring ’tachs to pencil lines. De Havilland sound systems swept from the East End into the city, reproducing stuttering swing and syrup sentiment. The British film industry, with Ministry of Information funding, turned out cheap but successful remakes of: The Foreman Went to France, One of Our Planes is Missing, and The Goose Steps Out. When the BBC repeated ’Allo ’Allo and Dad’s Army to higher viewing figures than the soaps, bombs fell on Albert Square and Brookside Close in retaliation, Euro-talks in Hamburg ground to an unresolvable deadlock, with ambassadors constantly on the point of recall. The spiv look alternated with the uniform style and there was much confusion over just who was entitled to wear British Army combat fatigues. Every West End theater had its wartime revue running; Andrew Lloyd Webber turned the Colditz story into a musical smash while Cameron Mackintosh produced Every Night Something Awful. Frankham had already signed for a coffee-table book on the movement. It was to be called The Finest Hour.

As he emerged into Cavendish Square, a knot of SS skins were being turned away from the War Room. The skinhead Gruppenfuhrer spat abuse at the Tommy on the door, biting down on harsh German phrases like cyanide-filled teeth. The Tommy stood his ground.

There’d been a brief shooting war on Remembrance Sunday, Nouveau Nazis skirmishing with flight-uniformed young men who called themselves the Few. It had been blown up in the papers, but the factions had chased each other up and down Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane, trading wild shots and smashing windows.

It was hard to get a cab. Frankham ambled along Margaret Street toward Regent Street and found a corner he could hail from. Standing on the pavement, he was aware of shapes crouched in the alley behind. Three sexless figures lay, their lower bodies swaddled in dirty sleeping-bags. Blank insectile eyes stood out in black-snouted faces. Gas masks.

There was a rush of noise and a whisk of air and Frankham dropped to the ground. Then came the flash and a scatter of hot ashes.

It had been close, maybe a street away. He turned and stood, and saw thin but giant flames shooting up above All Souls, Langham Place, and Broadcasting House. That one must have been an incendiary. It had fallen somewhere up on Great Portland Street, near the Post Office.

Fire-engines clanked and people were running toward and away from the explosion. Just standing, he was jostled. He patted the dust from his gabardine and stung his palm on a hot spark.

“… mumble, mumble,” said a gas mask.

“Pardon?” he said involuntarily.

“Mustn’t grumble,” the gas mask repeated.

“Worse things happen at sea,” another mask confirmed.

In the Troy Club, a Boffin, hand fused with a tumbler of Glenfiddich, tried to explain the nature of ghosts and time.

“… a collective wish can summon aspects of the past, invoke them if you will, actually bring into being objects or persons long gone…”

Frankham ignored the bespectacled loon and ordered a stiffish Gin and It. From the barman, who had patent-leather hair, hooded eyes, and a white dinner-jacket.

“Close scrape, I’ve just had,” he said.

“If it’s got your name on it, not much you can do, sir.”

Frankham threw the drink at the back of his throat. The stinging behind his eyes calmed him.

“Shook me up, I must say.”

The Troy always had the wireless on. A clubman spun the dial on the waist-high laminated cabinet, trying to find ITMA. He could only get purred news announcements about the latest raids and spun on at random. The wireless coughed out a sample of ranting Adolf, passed John Peel introducing Ambrose, then scratched into “The Lambeth Walk.”

“Bloody bad show, this,” snorted a Blimp who was having his ear bent by the Boffin. “Young turks have done for us well and proper. Too many green hands on the tiller, you know. All the good men pensioned off and put out to pasture.”

An airman, barely old enough to raise a ’tache, drank quietly and seriously at the bar, ignoring the Blimp and the Boffin. His hands were shaking almost unnoticeably.

“I should be up there,” he said, thumbing toward the ceiling. “I was due aloft tonight, but they canceled the scramble. Bomb or something. Fifth columnists, they say.”

“Very nasty business, sir,” said the barman. “The enemy within.”

“It’s deuced frustrating,” the airman declared, looking at his hands.” Just sitting here. Not being able to fight back. I’d just like to get one of the bogeys in my sights.”

“Not a man from the Last War on the General Staff,” blustered the Blimp. “All babies and boyos, with their computer planes and ballistic what-have-you. Don’t know the words to “God Save the King” and jitterbug to Yank bands on their leave…”

“As a society turns in on its insides,” said the Boffin, “loses forward momentum in nostalgia, the patterns of time and space itself may bend and bow, and even break. Nobody seems to notice…”

“Bloody Yanks. Bet they come in when it’s all over, grinning and dispensing chocolate and nylons like bloody manna from Heaven. Heaven, Arizona.”

“We continually try to rethink, to reimagine, the past. It’s possible that we actually unpick our destinies, change the situation. Look at all the books: Fatherland, When Adolf Came, SS/GB, The Man in the High Castle, The Sound of His Horn. We can wish it otherwise, and otherwise it could very well become…”

Frankham looked at his empty glass.

“Another drinkie, sir?” asked the barman.

Frankham ordered one and sprung for another for the airman. He was out of coupons but they knew him at the Troy. The barman could get anything, rationed or not, if slipped a little folded green.

“Think it’ll ever end?” the airman asked. “The War?”

“What War?” Frankham asked, missing something.

The airman didn’t answer, just drank. The Troy shuddered, framed pictures of Churchill and the Princesses rattling on the walls. A distant thunder shook the windows. A blind rolled up with a snap, and a voice from below shouted: “Put that light out.”

To judge from the streaks of angry red in the three o’clock skies, fires had spread. Narrow winding Hanway Street was unaffected by the actual bombardment, but the air was tangy with traces of smoke, the gutters heavy with the run-off from nearby fire-hoses.

Frankham and the airman, whose name was Somerton, had left the Boffin and the Blimp to their fractured conversation in the Club and ventured out in search of a livelier place. Somerton suggested a dancehall Frankham had already written up and written off. Since he was in a ginnily generous mood, he acceded. Who knows, the hole might be looking up. Everything comes around again eventually.

In the sky, dark shapes wheeled and swooped. Somerton looked up, almost with longing. There was a distorted burst of fire and a patter of spent shell-cases sounded a dozen yards away. After a fire-burst, something with a comet-tail of flame plunged downwards.

“Score one for some lucky blighter,” Somerton said.

Oxford Street was still barred to vehicle traffic, but gangs of soot-faced rubble-shifters were swarming over an extensive spill of debris. The fires were dying down and workmen were rooting through for hapless bods who might be trapped. A few disgraceful souls were getting in a spot of Christmas looting, pulling prizes—video recorders, television sets, gramophones—out of the wreckage. Most wore gas masks and were fast on their feet, no matter how weighted-down they were.

The plane, with swastika markings, had come down in the fountain at the base of Centerpoint. Its bent black fuselage was propped in the steaming shallow waters, hot chunks of wing-metal spread down into Charing Cross Road.

“A bogey,” spat Somerton. “Messerschmitt.”

Frankham’s head was hurting. Behind his skull, things were shifting. He needed more gins. Or fewer.

A souvenir stall opposite Centerpoint was squashed flat by a sheared-off aeroplane wheel. Union Jack bunting was turned to muddied scraps, and Cellophane-wrapped ARP helmets and beefeater models congealed into crinkling pools of melted plastic. A pair of Japanese tourists—enemy Axis aliens—snapped photographs of the stall from every angle, and were apprehended by a couple of constables. Frankham supposed they would be shot as spies.

Somerton wanted a look at the smashed plane. It was some new design, incorporating aerodynamic advances the Air Ministry was not yet aware of. In the empty cockpit, a bank of computer consoles shorted and sparked. The pilot must have hit the silk and come down somewhere nearby.

From the direction of Holborn came the sharp crack of gunfire. Rifle shots. Then, a burst of machine gun. Men in uniform trousers and braces broke away from the rescue gangs and seized weapons from a jeep stalled by Claude Gill’s.

Somerton crouched down, hauling Frankham out of the line of fire. At a run, Storm troopers charged down New Oxford Street and were greeted by accurate fire. Pinned down between the Tommies entrenched in the Virgin Megastore and an armed policeman who had been hiding in the entrance to Forbidden Planet, the Nazis were cut up properly. They hooted and heiled as bullets hit home.

The air was thick with flying lead. Frankham felt a stab in his upper arm and a hot damp seeping inside his jacket sleeve.

“Rats,” he said, “I’ve been shot.”

“So you have,” Somerton commented.

It was over swiftly. When the last goose-stepping goon was halted, knocked to his knees by a head-shot, some of the civvies gave out a cheer. In the open air, it sounded like the farting response in “Der Fuhrer’s Face.” Only the enemy seemed to have sustained casualties.

Frankham tried to get up and became awkwardly aware of the numbness in his upper chest.

“After you, Claude,” he said to Somerton, waving at the airman to stand.

“No,” said Somerton, helping Frankham up, “after you, Cecil.”

A Red Cross nurse came over and had a look at him. Her hair was pinned up under her cap. Frankham took a deep breath and it didn’t hurt too much. The nurse poked a finger into the blackened dotlike hole in his gabardine, and felt through his jacket and shirt.

“Just a graze, sweetheart,” he said.

“Keep smiling through,” she told him, and left. He glimpsed, in a shop window, a row of civilian casualties by Top Man, all with neatly-bloodied bandages around their heads.

“Proper little angel,” Somerton commented.

“Sometimes, I think it’s harder on the women,” Frankham said. “Yet they complain so little.”

Enough rubble had been shifted to let tanks into Oxford Street. Three of them had been held in reserve near Marble Arch and now they rumbled placidly toward the downed Messerschmitt. Frankham and Somerton gave the Victory-V sign as they passed, and a tank officer, bundled up in thick jumpers, returned the gesture.

“Makes a feller proud,” Somerton said. “To see everyone doing their bit.”

He woke up with a fearful gin head in some chippie’s single bed. He remembered a name—Dottie—and the dancehall, and vaguely supposed he was as far out as Camden or Islington. His arm was stiff and cold, and there was a shifting and uncomfortable girl next to him, face smeared with last night’s makeup.

He didn’t know what had happened to Somerton or to the girl—Hettie?—he had been dancing with.

Frankham rolled off the bed and hauled himself upright. Dottie—or was this Hettie?—was instantly relieved and filled out the space under the sheet, settling in for more sleep.

He dressed one-handed and managed everything but his cufflinks. The hole in his arm was a scabby red mark. He guessed there was still a lump of bullet inside him.

Outside, he didn’t recognize the street. Half the buildings in the immediate area had been bombed out, either last night or within the last month. One completely demolished site was flooded, a small reservoir in the city. The neat piles of fallen masonry were mainly bleached white as bones.

As he walked, his head hurt more and more. Around him, early-morning people busied themselves, whistling cheerfully as they worked, restoring recent damage. There weren’t many cars about, but a lot of people were nipping between the craters on bicycles.

There was a tube station nearby, the Angel. It was a part-time shelter, but the trains were running again. A policeman at the entrance was checking papers. Many of the bombed-out were being reassigned to vacant housing.

As he went down the escalator into the depths, Frankham passed framed advertisements for Ovaltine, a Googie Withers film, Lipton’s Tea, powdered eggs, Bovril. Every third advertisement showed the Old Man giving the V-sign, with a balloon inviting tourists to share the “Blitz Experience.”

Suddenly, halfway down the escalator, Frankham had to sit, a shudder of cold pain wrenching his wounded arm. Passersby stepped delicately around him, and the moving steps nudged him out at the bottom. He found a place to sit, and tried to will the throbbing in his forehead away.

A little girl with curls stepped into his field of vision. Her mother, with a calf-length swirl of skirts and precious nylons, tugged disapprovingly.

“Don’t play with the poor man, dear.”

The little girl dumped something in his lap and was pulled away. Frankham looked down at the canvas-covered lump and, with his good hand, undid the bundle. A gas mask tumbled out. He lifted it up to his face and, fumbling with the straps, fitted it on, inhaling the smell of rubber and cotton. Somehow the pain was eased. He drew up his knees and hugged them.

It wouldn’t be over by Christmas, Frankham knew. But that didn’t matter. London could take it.