She saw him on Number Four screen. He must have rushed outside to avoid her crying; now he was entering the house, turning to close the door—my God, was locking it! Locking it! What did he mean to do?
Anna ran out of the nearer living room door and into the kitchen. Panic momentarily overcame her. She ran across the kitchen and pulled open the door. Surely he was intending to trap her, or else why lock the front door? He had said he never locked it—What was that ghastly phrase?—“If I don’t lock up, I can escape faster”? Nutty as a fruit cake!
She ran from the kitchen. The gravel outside had sprouted so many weeds, so much grass, that it hardly showed any more. She hurried through them, thinking she had better get to her car and clear off, or at least go and get a drink and then return, cautiously, and plead with him to let Stokes-Wallis examine him. . . As she turned the corner and came to the front of the house, her father emerged from the front door and—no, it was not a run—hastened to her car.
Anna stopped a few yards away.
“What are you playing at, father?”
“Are you going already, Anna?”
She went a little nearer.
“You aren’t trying to stop me leaving, are you?”
“You are leaving, then, are you?” His hair almost concealed his eyes.
She paused.
“It’s best if I leave, father. I don’t understand your work, you refuse to explain it to me, and I interrupt it in any case. It’s not just a question of that either, is it? I mean, there’s the question of temperament, too, isn’t there? We’ve never got on. It was your business—the way I look at it—to get on with me if you could, since I was your daughter, your only child, but, no, you never fucking well cared, did you? I was just an intrusion between you and mother. Okay, then I’ll get out, and as far as I’m concerned you can sit and goggle at your empty screens till you fall dead. Now get out of my way!”
As she came forward, Felix stepped back from the car. He let his gaze drop so that his eyes were completely hidden by the overhanging lock of his hair. His arms hung by his side. In his stained grey trousers and his torn sweater, he looked helpless and negative.
Proud of her victory, Anna marched forward and grasped the door handle of the Triumph. As she pulled it open, he seized her fiercely from behind, locking his arms round her so that her elbows were pinned against her sides.
She yelled in fright. A passenger jet roared overhead, taking up and drowning the note of her cry while he spun her round and dragged her into the house.
Even in her fury and fear, she found time to curse herself for forgetting that mannerism of her father’s. How often as a child had she seen him doing as he did then, suddenly turning deceptively limp and passive before springing on her like an enemy! She should not have been deceived!—But of course memory so often worked to obliterate the miseries of reality!
Once he had got her into the hall, he pulled her toward the side door into the garage. Anna recovered her wits and kicked backwards at his legs. He was immensely strong! Together, they tripped over the cables in the entrance and half-fell down the concrete step into the garage. As she broke from his grip, he caught her again and momentarily they were face to face.
“You’re the enemy!” he said. “You’re one of the non-humans!”
Above their heads were unpainted wood shelves, crudely fixed to the wall with brackets and loaded with boxes of spools of plastic-covered wire. Pinning his daughter to the wall, Felix reached up and dragged down one of the spools. The action tumbled a couple of boxes, and nails cascaded over their heads. Tugging savagely at her, Felix commenced to bind her round and round with wire, securing her ankles as well as her wrists.
He was just finishing when they heard a distant knocking.
Felix straightened. He pushed his hair from his eyes.
“That’ll be the grocer. Don’t make a sound, Anna, or I’ll be forced—well, you know what I’ll be forced to do!” He gave her a hard straight look which included no recognition of her as a human being.
As soon as he had got into the hall and was making for the kitchen, from which the knocking came, Anna struggled upright and hobbled towards the door. It was impossible to climb up the step into the hall with her ankles bound; she fell up it. Before she was on her feet again, her father was coming back. He had a letter in his hand, and was smiling.
“A Glasgow postmark—this will be from Professor Nicholson! The grocer kindly brings my mail along from the post office. He’s a good fellow. He recognized your car; I told him I was having the pleasure of a visit from you. Now, my dear, we are going to get you upstairs. If you help yourself a bit, it won’t be so painful.”
“Father, what are you going to do with me? Please let me go! I’m not a little girl any more, to be punished when I disobey your orders.”
He laughed. “No, you are far from being a little girl, Anna. Just how far, I intend to discover for myself.”
She stared at him in shock, as if for the first time the helplessness of her position was made real to her. He read her expression and laughed again, a lot less pleasantly.
“Oh, no, my dear, I didn’t mean what you think—whatever fantasies you entertain in the depths of your mind!”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking!”
“I don’t want to know what you’re thinking! What a miserable generation yours was, obsessed by sex, yet totally unable to come to terms with your own sexuality. Your mother and I had a far better time than you or any of your friends will ever have!”
By dint of pushing and lifting, he got her upstairs and trundled her past the bathroom into the bedroom whose door stood open opposite the head of the stairs. She found herself in a bedroom at the back of the house, recognizing it indifferently as the room she had seen on the viewing screen.
“Now!” he said, looking round frowning.
He loosed some of the wire from her ankles, led her over to the bed, and tied her legs to the bedpost, so that she was forced to sit there. Then he disappeared. She heard him going downstairs. A minute later, he was back, a tenon saw in one hand. He knelt by the door and started to saw low down on the leading edge. When he had got six inches in, he stood and kicked vigorously at the bottom of the door. The wood splintered and a piece sagged outward. He kicked at it until it was loose.
The door would now shut, despite the cables trailing over the floor. Looking meaningfully at her once, he went out, and she heard him turning the key in the lock. She was properly imprisoned.
Impotently listening, she heard him march downstairs. Silence, then the sound of the Triumph engine starting up. What a fool she was to have left the key in the ignition—by no means for the first time! But he could always have taken the key from her bag; she had left it in the kitchen.
She heard the car engine fade almost immediately; so he had driven it round the side of the house, parking it beyond the kitchen door, where it would not be noticed from the road.
The grocer might see it when he called again—but how long ahead would that be? Evidently no postman called—the grocer had agreed to deliver her father’s post. Perhaps no other tradesman came up this cul-de-sac; her father might well rely on the friendly grocer for all supplies. Of course, she had told Trevor and some of the fellows in the labs where she was going, but Trevor was not to be relied on, while the rest of them would not give her another thought until Monday, when she did not show up for work. She was on her own.
Well, that was nothing new. It was just that the situation was more extreme than usual.
Anna was already working to free her hands. It should be possible. She had already noticed that her father had left—carelessly or by design?—the saw on the floor by the door. It might come in useful.
The front door slammed.
Of course, he could watch her over the Omniviewer. She glared across the room at the dull lens of the camera, bracketed in the wall against the disused grate, a foot above floor-level. She would just have to hope that he was unable
to watch all the time.
Her feet were less tightly tied than her wrists and arms. After working away carefully, she managed to slip one of her brogues off, and then to wriggle her stockinged foot from the coils. The other one came out easily, and she could walk round the room.
Still pulling at her wrists, she ran over to the window and looked out.
Clouds had piled up in the sky. The afternoon was torpid. She was looking over what had once been a vegetable garden. Impenetrable weeds grew there. They stopped at the high wire fence, drab green and stretching away into the distance. Beyond the fence lay the airport, flat and featureless. She could see no building from this window, only a distant plane, deserted on a runway.
The view was blank and alien. It offered her no courage.
Hooking her wrists over the catch of the window, she pulled and wriggled to such effect that in a minute her hands were free. As she rubbed her hands together, she listened for his footstep on the stair.
Just how dangerous was he? She could not estimate. That he was her father made it all more difficult to calculate, more bizarre. If he came up, would he not, this time—at last—put his arms round her and love and forgive her for all her shortcomings?
No, he bloody well wouldn’t!
The door was locked, as expected.
Anna crossed to the single picture on the wall above the bed, a sepia reproduction mounted and set in a solid oak frame. As she pulled it down, she saw that it represented a Roman sentry in armor standing guard before a gateway leading into a luridly lit court in which people were dying and dead—flares of some kind were falling from the skies on to them. The picture was called “Faithful Unto Death.” She swung it in front of the camera, propping it against a chair so that the view was obstructed. Then she opened the window and looked out.
Felix Macguire was standing among the weeds aiming a gun of some kind at her. A rifle, possibly. Aimed at her. Half-fainting, she sank back inside the room.
Leaning against the wall, she heard him shouting. She began listening to his words.
“I’d have fired if you’d tried to jump. I warn you, Anna! You may not fully understand the situation, but I do. The fact that you are my daughter makes no difference. You are not going to leave here, or not until I say you can. Professor Basil Nicholson is coming tomorrow, and I want him to look at you. Behave yourself and you’ll come to no harm. If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll lock you in the landing cupboard without food. Forget you’re my daughter—remember you’re my captive. Now then—shut that window. Do you hear, shut the window?!”
She summoned enough presence of mind to look out and say, though without all the spirit she hoped for, “Try and realize what you are saying and doing, father! You are now formally renouncing me as your daughter, which is what you have wished to do all your life. You are also threatening to shoot me!”
He said angrily, “This is a French carbine, used against rioters. I’ll fire if you don’t get back. I mean every word.” A few drops of rain began to fall.
“I’m sure you do! I don’t doubt that. I’m sure you do! I’m sure you’d love to fire. But you should recognize what it means. You have now crossed the dividing line between sanity and madness. You are also committing a criminal act!”
“Get your head inside and close—” His words were drowned by the roar of an airliner coming in to land, but his threatening gestures were enough for her. Anna pulled her head back and wearily shut the window. She laid down on the bed and tried to think what she should do. Her stomach rumbled like thunder.
It was a problem to understand how matters between them had deteriorated so rapidly. Was it just because she had forgotten to watch his demonstration on the monitor, or because of some other fault of which she was unaware? And what had the demonstration been? Something minor, despite its build-up, that was clear: perhaps merely watching her father in the kitchen over the closed-circuit. Instead, she had been hooked into watching an empty room—this room. “Getting control of reality”: that had been his phrase. Had he, her all-powerful and untouchable father, been rewarded for his years of isolation—whether unwished for or self-imposed—by some amazing insight into the physical conditions governing man? Had he really stumbled on an equivalent to Galileo’s proof of the heliocentric system? It was not past the bounds of credibility—but nothing was past the bounds of credibility these days. And if he had so done, he would naturally be impatient (though impatient was scarcely the word) with any silly girl who failed to follow him closely when he attempted to explain.
She lay looking up at the ceiling. She could hear rain outside, and another slight sound. The camera was still working.
Warmth and comfort overcame her. Perhaps the aspirins were taking effect; her headache had gone. She began to recall summer days in their old house, before she had grown up, when her mother was alive, and she had lain as she was now lying on her bed, idly reading a book; the window was open to the summer breezes, and she could hear her parents down in the garden, exchanging an odd sentence now and again. Her mother was gardening, her father working on a monograph on lacunae in the theory of evolution which never got published. Evolutionary theory was always his hobby—a complete contrast from the pushing world of electronics into which his job took him. She had put her book down and gone over—yes, she had been barefoot—gone over to the window and looked out. He had waved to her and called something . . .
“Can you hear me, father? I didn’t mean to miss your demonstration, whatever it was, if that is why you’re punishing me. If possible, I’d like to understand and help. It could be that when watching the big screen I had a useful insight into what you meant about reality. A view over the screen is different in some undefined way to a view direct, isn’t it?”
No answer. She lay looking up at the ceiling, listening. She had often listened like this before going to sleep as a child, wondering if someone would come up and visit her. The ceiling blurred; suggestions of warmth and other modes of being moved in; she slept.
Felix Macguire sat at the console, resting his elbow on the desk and rubbing his chin, as he peered at the big screen. It showed part of a scene at the Herculanean Gate of Pompeii in A.D. 79, with the inhabitants about to be destroyed; a soldier in close-up stood at his post, eyes raised fearfully towards the unknown.
The light values on the soldier’s face changed almost unnoticeably as Felix ran back the tape and played over again the words his daughter had spoken.
. . . had a useful insight into what you meant by reality. A view over the screen is different in some undefined way to a view direct, isn’t it?”
He ran it back again, listening mainly to the tone of her voice.
“I didn’t mean to miss your demonstration, whatever it was, if that is why you are punishing me. If possible I’d like to understand and help. It could be that when watching the big screen I had a useful insight into—”
He clicked her off. Always that pleading and cajoling note in her voice which he recalled from her childhood. A jarring note. No wonder no man had ever married her.
Silence in her room. But it was not the usual silence he received from Number Two bedroom. The usual silence had a sort of thin and rather angular dazed quality unique to itself, resembling the surface of a Vermeer canvas, and with a similar sense almost of planning behind it; he thought of it as an intellectual silence and, of course, it differed from the silence in the other rooms. With Anna’s occupancy, the silence took on an entirely different weight, a bunched and heavy mottled feeling which he disliked.
The sound levels were so good that he could detect when she was drifting towards sleep. It was her way of eluding reality; a little editing of tape would soon bring her back to her uncomfortable senses.
She roused, sat up suddenly, aware that her mouth had fallen open. Someone was whispering in the room. She had caught the sound of her own voice. “. . . a useful insight . . .”
Then her father’s voice, indistinct, and then her own, perfectly clear
:
“Can you hear me, father?” And his reply: “Why didn’t you watch what your mother and I were doing? You’re old enough to learn the facts of life.”
“I didn’t mean to miss your demonstration, whatever it was, if that is why you’re punishing me.”
“What do you mean, ‘whatever it was,’ Anna? Come back into the bedroom and watch—we’re just going to start again.”
“If possible, I’d like to understand and help.”
“That’s better. Jump in with your mother. You’ll soon learn.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, flushing with shame.
“You’re right round the bloody twist, father!” she said aloud. “For Christ’s sake let me out of here and let me go home. I’ll never bother you again—you can be sure of that!”
He came in the bedroom door, grinning in an uneasy way.
“Forget all that—just a bit of innocent fun! You see what can be done with reality! Now look, Anna, you present me with a bit of a problem. I’ll have to keep you here overnight, so you’d better resign yourself to the fact. Basil Nicholson is coming tomorrow—his visit is very important to me, because for the first time I’m going to present my findings to an impartial outside observer. Nicholson and I have been in communication for months, and he’s sufficiently impressed by what I’ve told him to come and look for himself. You could be useful in more than one way. So you’ll have to stay here and behave. If all goes well, you can go home tomorrow afternoon. Okay?”
She just sat and stared at him. The whole business was too horrifying to be believed.
Felix picked up the framed engraving and hung it back on the wall. As he went towards the door, he picked up the saw. He smiled and waved it at her, a gesture part-friendly, part-menacing.
“Why don’t you kill me, father? You know I can never forgive you—pointing a gun at your own daughter. I saw murder in your eyes, I did.”
He paused with a hand on the door. “Never forgive? You can’t say that. Never forgive? Never? Think what a long journey it is between birth and death . . . anything is possible on the way.”
Strangeness Page 6