From then on, he let weeds grow in his garden and the beeches become shaggier in the drive. He stayed indoors, concentrating on developing an advanced system of vision screens he called the Omniviewer, and thinking about the growing inhumanity of man.
“Oh, piss!” said Anna. She steered the Triumph into the side of the road and pulled the map over to her. She had gone wrong somewhere. She didn’t recognize this stretch of road at all. She should have been through Wainsley by now. The map remained inscrutable.
She climbed out and stood in the road. There was no traffic. Anonymous countryside all round. Being a towns-woman, she could not tell whether or not the fields were properly tended. The only landmark was an old railway station down a lane, its ruined roof showing across the nearest field. No rails served this monument to an obsolete transport system. Huge elms choked by ivy stood everywhere; she watched a transport plane appear to blunder between them like a huge moth.
A man stood in front of her. He might have materialised out of the ground. She thought immediately, “It’s true, I wouldn’t mind being raped, if we could go somewhere comfortable, but he might have all sorts of horrible diseases. And he might strangle me when he’d finished.”
But the man simply said, “You aren’t going to Casterham, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I want to get to Crackmore. Do you know if I’m going the right way?”
He’d never heard of Crackmore. But he set her right for Wainsley, and she drove on again. At the last moment, she offered him a lift, but he refused; he wasn’t going to be led on.
“I’m so isolated,” she said aloud, “so isolated,” as she drove.
But she had to admit to herself that it was a half-heard protest; after all, she could always have asked the man if she wanted it that badly. People did, these days.
The self-focusing cameras were his especial contribution. Light-and-motion-sensitive cells ensured that lenses focused on him whenever he entered a room. Working slowly, spending a generous part of every day out in the workshop-laboratory next to the disused garage, Felix built himself a spy-system, which would record any movements within the house.
When he had a few thoughts to express, Felix uttered them aloud and the house swallowed them as a whale swallows plankton—and would regurgitate them later on request.
“The Omniviewer is designed purely for self-observation; it is introspective. All other spy-systems have been extravert, designed to watch other people. Their purposes have generally been malign. The parallel with the human senses is striking. Human beings are generally motivated throughout life to watch others and not themselves, right from the early days in which they begin to learn by imitation and example . . . I must remind the grocer when he calls that that last lot of tinned meat gave me diarrhea . . .”
Leaving the workshop, he went through the garage into the hall, which he crossed, and entered the living room. This he had bisected with partitioning some while ago, when he had been feeling his way towards a correct method of procedure for his experiments. It was in the far corner of the living room, the south-pointing corner of the house, that he had built his main control console. The workship contained an auxiliary console.
From the main console, he could direct the movements of the nine cameras situated about the house, mainly on the ground floor. On monitor screens before him, he could keep a zealous eye on most corners of the house—and above all on himself. Several times, he had detected movements that roused—indeed, confirmed—his suspicions, and of these he kept careful note, recording place, time, and appearance and gesture of the alien pseudo-appearance. “Alien pseudo-appearance” was his first, half-joking, label for his early discoveries.
As usual, when he began work in the morning, he ran through a thorough check of all electronic equipment and sightings. That took him till noon. It was more than a check. It was a metaphysical exploration. It was a confirmation both of the existence of his world and of its threatened disintegration.
He switched the cameras on in turn, according to the numbered sequence he had given them, beginning with Number One. In this way, organisation was held at maximum. Not until much later in the morning would he get round to testing Camera Nine, perched outside on the chimney-stack of the house—none of the other cameras, except Five and Three, were situated for looking beyond the confining walls; that was not their province.
As Camera One briefly warmed, a scatter of geometrical patterns flashed like blueprints across the small monitor, grew, grew, burst, and were instantly gone. An unwavering picture snapped into being on the tiny screen.
This camera was located on its pivot in the wall behind Felix and some two feet above his head. As it was it present directed, beamed downwards and ahead (he carefully read off its three-dimensional positioning on a calibrated control globe), it showed the control console itself, with its switches and monitors, and Felix’s right hand resting on the desk; the back of Felix’s head was visible in one corner; so was the lower half of the partition, on which a giant viewing-screen had been erected. Also visible were the edge of the carpet, part of the wall, and a section of the window sill. The pattern on the monitor was a restful one of converging angles, relieved by the greater complexity covering about a third of the screen of the console.
Felix scrutinized the view in a leisurely and expert manner. In many ways, One always provided the most absorbing view, if not the most interesting perspectives.
After a thorough scrutiny, he switched on the large viewing-screen. Before viewing it direct, he watched it light in the monitor-screen, via One.
The scatter of particles cleared and the tiny screen showed him the lower strip of the large screen, on which part of the console with the monitors was visible. On Number One of these tiny monitors, he could see the image of the lower strip of the large screen, with its lineup of monitors on the console. On the first of those monitors was a blur of light which the definition, however good, would not resolve into a clear image. Better lenses were probably the answer there, and he was working on that.
Satisfied at last with optical details, he set the camera controls to Slow Scan.
Camera One had a scan of two hundred and ten degrees laterally and a little less in the vertical axis. Among the many pleasures of its field of vision—to be taken in due turn—was the view at 101.40 N, 72.50 W, which gave the corner of the room, where the south-east and south-west walls of the house met at the ceiling, as well as an oblique of the right-hand of the two windows in the front (south-east) wall. The merging and diverging lines were particularly significant, and there was the added pleasure of the paradox that although almost all the window could be seen, the view was so oblique that little could be observed beyond the window, except an insignificant stretch of weedy gravel; this seemed to reduce the window to a properly insignificant stature.
Also desirable, and considerably more complex, was the view at 10.00 N, 47.56 E. It gave one insignificant corner of the console, looking over it toward one of the two doors in the L-shaped room which led into the hall-passage. Through this door, the camera took in a dark section of the passage, the doorway of the dining room beyond, and a segment of the dining room including a bit of the table with a chair pushed in to it (the dining room was never used), the carpet, a shadowy piece of ceiling, something of one of the two windows, and Camera Six, which stood on a bracket set in the wall at a height slightly less than that of One. 10.00 N, 47.56 E became even more engrossing when Six was functioning, since it then showed One in action; and, when One was in motion, its slight and delicate action was the only observable movement.
There were automatic as well as manual controls for each camera, so that “favourite” or “dangerous” or “tranquil” views could be flicked over to at a moment’s notice. There were also programmed automatics, by means of which the eight indoor cameras ran through a whole interrelated series of sightings of high complexity and enfiladed the entire volume of the house—for Felix had his moments of panic, when the idea
that he had caught an unsuspecting movement, a figure all too like his own, would send his adrenalin-count rocketing and his heart pounding, and he would snap into a survey of the whole territory. His recording system allowed him to play-back and study any particular view at leisure.
Frequently, he saw shots which filled him with grave doubt, as he played them back and allowed his heart-rate to ease. Although no figures were revealed—his opponents were very clever—their presence was of the implied by shadows, dark smudges, mingled fans of light and shade on carpet. They were there, right enough, meddling deliberately; and although no doubt some of the discrepancies in the visual record could be ascribed to aircraft passing low overhead, they were unwise to think he would always use that excuse as a pretext for believing in their non-existence.
When he had thoroughly tested out Camera One through its entire sphere of scan, Felix left it running—and it would run now until he closed down after mid-light—and switched on Camera Two.
Camera Number Two was on the far wall of the workshop. It had been the first of the series of cameras to be installed. It overlooked the length of the narrow workshop, including the screens of the auxiliary console, and the door at the far end, which always stood open (not only for security reasons but because the coaxial cable running to the rest of the house prevented its closure) to give a view into the garage, piled high with its old grocer’s cartons and crates of tapex.
Although none of the cameras offered a very colourful scene, two gave the greyest one. As, under Felix’s control, it commenced its slow scan, it had nothing bright to show, although rolling towards the roof like an upturning eye, it picked up a patch of blue sky through the reinforced glass skylight.
When it lit obliquely on the three blown-up photographs on the inner wall, Felix slowed the motor until the view was held almost steady and stared with satisfaction at the images of the photographs thrown on the big screen before him. There he saw three gigantic sea-going creatures, each remarkably similar to the next in its functional streamlined form. Something of his original thrill of horror and discovery came back to him as he looked.
He said aloud: “My evolutionary discovery is greater than Charles Darwin’s, or his grandfather’s . . . greater and far more world-shaking. Darwin revealed only part of the truth, and that revelation has ever since concealed a far greater and more awesome truth. Do you hear me out there? I have the patience and courage of Charles Darwin . . . I too will wait for years if necessary, until I have incontrovertible proof of my theories . . .”
Still staring at the images of the photographs, he switched to playback. He sat listening to his own voice, filtering softly through the house.
“—man being are generally motivated throughout life to watch others and not themselves, right from the early days in which they begin to learn by imitation and example . . . I must remind the grocer when he calls that that last lot of tinned meat gave me diarrhea . . . My evolutionary discovery is greater than Charles Darwin’s . . .”
He heard himself out and then added, “The proof is mounting slowly.”
He smiled at the pictures. They were more than a statement of faith; they were a defiance of the enemy. In truth, he inwardly cared little for his own bombast broadcast through the silent and possibly unoccupied rooms; yet it gave him a certain courage—and courage was needed at all times by all who moved towards the unknown—and of course it had a propaganda value. So he sat quietly, breathing regularly under his tattered sweater, as he watched the viewpoint of Two crawl lethargically past the marine shapes and up the formless areas of wall.
When Anna reached what was left of Crackmore, the morning was well advanced. She stopped the car at the filling station and got petrol. She had a headache and a sniffy nose. The pollen count was high, the midsummer heat closed about her temples.
“Oh God, don’t say I’m going to get one of my streaming colds! What a bore!”
With a feeling of oppression, she saw as she left the untidy station that the village had entered a phase of new and ugly growth. A big filling station was under construction not a hundred meters away from the one at which she had stopped. Next to it, a pokey estate of semi-detacheds was going up. A new road to the connecting road to the airport was being built, cutting through what was left of the old village. Although, admittedly, the old village was nothing to get excited about, at least it had preserved a sense of proportion, had been agreeably humble in scale. Now a gaunt supermarket was rising behind the old square, dwarfing the church. Everywhere was cluttered and uncomfortable. She was amazed—as so often before—at how many people showed a preference for an inhuman environment. As she drove by the road-making machines, a jet roared overhead, reminding her of her headache.
“Piss off!” she told it.
It was so senseless. There could now be nobody remaining in Crackmore who desired to live there. Most of them would be attached to the ground staff of the airport or something similar, and lived where they did purely for financial interest. Anyone with any spark of humanity in them had fled from the area long ago.
She turned off by the old war memorial (“Faithful Unto Death” 1914-1918, 1939-1945) and headed towards her father’s house. The road shimmered in its own heat, creating imaginary pools and quagmires into which she drove.
Round the last corner, she passed the burnt-out shell of the Standish mansion. Burdock grew along its drive, rusty with July, and eager green things had sprung up round what was left of the structure. Sweet rocket flowered haphazardly. The shade under the high beeches behind was as dark as night. Ahead, lopping off the road, the airport fence. The fence put a terminator on everything—beyond was only the anticyclonic weather, breaking into slatey cumulus, which began to pile up the sky like out-of-hand elms, growing above low cloud and threatening a chance of thunder before the afternoon died.
The drive gates stood open. As the Triumph turned in, Anna saw that the drab green fence was closer to her father’s house than she recalled. It was too long since she last visited Felix; her neglect of him was part of a greater neglect, of the wastage of everything.
On the other side of the fence, the road had been eradicated; machines had wiped it out of existence; on this side of the fence, nature was at work doing the same thing, throwing out an advance guard of wild grasses and buttercup, following up with nettles, dock, thistles, and brambles. Soon they would come sprawling their way along the road. It only needed a year or two, and they would be at the house.
Anna drew up before the front door, noting how the trees about the drive, beech and copper beech, had grown more ragged and encroached more since she was last here. She blew her nose before climbing out, not wishing her father to suspect she might have a cold developing.
The house had been solidly built just after the turn of the century, with grey slate roof and red brick, and a curious predilection for stone round the windows. It had never been fashionable or imposing, though perhaps aiming at both; nevertheless, even in its old neglected age, it manifested something of the rather flashy solidity of the epoch in which it had been designed and constructed.
Before entering, Anna let a certain dread provoke her into stepping across the weedy gravel to peer through the living room windows. Through the second window, she saw her father crouched in his swivel chair, looking fixedly at something beyond the range of her vision. She stared at him as at a stranger. Felix Macguire was still a powerful man, the lines of his face were still commanding, while the recession of his guns lent more emphasis than at any other stage in his life to a determined line of chin and jaw. His white hair, hanging forward over his brow, still contained something of the boisterousness she recalled in her childhood. All in all, he, like the house, had weathered well, retaining the same flashy solidity of the Edwardian Age.
Feeling guilty for spying on him, she turned away, thinking in a depressed way that her father seemed scarcely changed in appearance from when she could first remember him in childhood; yet she herself no longer had youthful
expectations of life, and was moving towards middle age. With her habitual quick shift of thought, she ironically pronounced herself resigned to her own listless company.
She tried the handle of the front door. It opened. Hinges squeaked as she entered the hall.
Despite the heat outside, the feeling in the house was one of cold and damp: a comfortlessness less physical than an attribute of the phantoms haunting it. But the lengths of coaxial cable running boldly over the carpet or snaking up the stairs, the doors—to garage, lavatory, coat cupboard, and living room—wedged open, all contributed to the discomfort—not to mention the slow stare of Camera Four, situated knee-high on its bracket on the corner of the coat cupboard, where it could survey front door, hall, passage, and stairs.
“Are you there, father? It’s me, Anna.”
She went down the passage and through the second door of the living room. He had risen from the console and stood awaiting her. She went over to him and kissed him.
“How are you? You’re looking well! Why didn’t you write or send me a few words on a tape? I’ve been worried. I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last visit, but we’ve been terribly busy at the labs—trade’s bad, and that always seems to mean more work, for me at least. I had to go up to Newcastle with one of the partners last weekend or I would have come over then. Did you get my card, by the way? I’m sure I’ve sent you that view of the Civic Hall before, but it seemed to be the only view they had at the tobacconist’s . . .”
She paused and her father said, “It’s good of you to bother to come at all, Anna. I’ll get you a cup of coffee, or something, shall I?”
“No, no, I’ll get it. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? And may I open a window or two? It’s terribly stuffy in here—it is July, you know, and you need some warm air circulating. And why don’t you keep the front door locked when you are alone in the house? Suppose someone broke in?”
Strangeness Page 4