A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson [Atkinson, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Historical, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / War & Military, Fiction / Historical
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-05-05T07:00:00+00:00

There hadn’t been much in the way of flak on the run in to Turin, the Italian ack-ack guns always seemed half-hearted. They bombed the target from sixteen thousand feet, on the red markers. The weather had started to close in on the approach. The Alps were no longer beautiful—no longer visible, in fact—and as they turned for home they found themselves confronted by a huge dark tower of cumulus, looming high above them. Inside this monster there were flashes and sparks as if small explosions were going off and at first they thought it must be something to do with the bombing—or even some new kind of weapon that was being tried out on them—and it took a few moments before they understood that they were flying into an enormous, sinister thunderhead.

The turbulence was atrocious, rocking J-Jig around as if it were a toy aircraft. As flies to wanton boys. Or wanton gods. Zeus throwing his thunderbolts, Thor wielding his hammer. The fairies moving their furniture, Bridget used to say, a less vengeful interpretation for a kinder time. Some fairies, Teddy thought. On the intercom he could hear the curses ranging from Norman’s terrified Christian restraint—“Oh, dear Lord”—to Keith’s bitter “Fuck, fuck, fuck, get us the fuck out of this, skip.”

They were all agreed afterwards that it was worse than any flak they had ever encountered. Flak they understood, but this was something more primeval. Occasionally the lightning illuminated malevolent fissures and caverns within the dark mass. The turbulent air currents were random—bucking and bucketing them up and down or sideways—and Teddy wondered if the aircraft might simply break up from stress.

The outside temperature dropped dramatically and ice started to form on the wings. Ice was a fierce enemy, it could appear rapidly and sometimes without warning—several tons of it, freezing the engines and the controls and covering the wings in thick white slabs. It could make an aircraft so heavy that it simply fell out of the sky or broke into pieces in the air.

The intercom was alive now with involuntary “Jesus”s and “Christ”s and “Fuck”s as they were thrown around and, too, the murmur of Psalm 23, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” which was interrupted by several gasps of astonishment as J-Jig was abruptly ejected from the thunderhead only to find herself possessed by a phantom.

Touched everywhere by St. Elmo’s fire, bright blue and unearthly—an eerie luminescence that flared along the edges of the wings and even whirled round with the propellers, spinning off them and making strange feathery trails in the darkness, like ghostly Catherine wheels. It was “dancing” between the tips of his guns, Kenny reported from the rear. “Up here too,” from the mid-upper.

The strange phenomenon made Teddy think of the Willis in Giselle. He had seen a performance of the ballet when he was at school, a trip to the Royal Opera House organized by the music master. The dancers had been lit by the same rather sinister and otherworldly blue light that was now attracted to J-Jig.

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