by Stine, Hank
The watch began to run.
The second hand swept forward and down. The works began to tick. He knew with a cold, sharp certainty that it actually was six: that their power extended even this far. He dropped the arm, lifted his shoulders to settle his jacket, and stepped forward on to the path.
Gravel crunched and popped underfoot as he went around the hotel to the drive.
He had glimpsed the emerald of his car from the air (moment’s shock of recognition marring the landing as he brought the helicopter down, stirring up a fine wet lather from the golf course green). And now, as he moved through the misty, silent dawn its dew condensing on his face, he felt a terrible unease to know it stood there, defying logic in the chill reality of the day.
He turned the corner and saw it, shining and sharp, the long, clean lines of the Flamberge body, so much like the Rolls-Royce of MGs; the jaunty yellow hood, the green carriage, the polarised windscreen, the driver’s door open and ready: engine running. He went round to the side and looked down at the interior. Yes, it was his, even to the scar of Janet’s cigarette on the passenger seat, the tape in the player as he’d left it: Surrealistic Pillow.
The keys glittered, trembling with the low throb of the motor—gold chain hanging from them, his initials, J.D., on the fob. He reached in his trouser pocket: there was only the starched vacancy of the cloth at his fingertips. Yet those keys on that very chain had been there. He’d been given them as he climbed in. How, then, had they come here in the sun-filtered reality of the morning?
He looked across the sparkling lawn to the whitewashed façade of the hotel. It was silent and empty; nothing stirred behind the dark, shadowed windows. Yet he knew that this was the most popular resort in the Kingdom. And even it (as real and incontrovertible as the familiar tooling of the car here at his side) held a faint suggestion of unreality, like a set not yet in use.
Building (sharp and solid in the pearly light), air, shrubbery, worn stone fences: these were of the world he knew. Surely there was nothing sinister or harmful in them.
He turned his head and looked right, down the road. It wound up away from the grey-gabled houses of the village beyond. This much was familiar. This was real. This was the home he had chosen for his retirement.
‘It’s easy to pronounce,’ he’d told the girl. And it was. Portmeirion, on the Pembroke coast of Wales, second home of Coward, Shaw, and Russell. As real as it was easy to pronounce. And, weirdly, less real—for this was the world he’d left: the mad Disneyland of the village.
Somewhere, a cock crowed, and he stepped into the car, settling back against the seat, and swinging the door shut. He closed a hand on the gear stick, shoved in on the clutch, and let the engine rev. It gave a deep, full-throated roar, and he smiled, shifting into first and rolling forward over the drive and out on to the road.
The wind whipped in against him as he picked up speed, and he stared out through grey, polarised glass at green fields, hilly and rough.
The tarmac angled up, climbing the mountains, and he looked into the rear-view mirror, catching, for a moment, the reflection of the resort behind, its grey gabled spires the last visible reminder of the Village so far behind.
It dropped behind and was gone.
Then there was only the wind, the mist, and the roar of his exhausts in the primordial stillness of the dawn.
For, if he could not really trust this engine, at least he did not mistrust it. It felt right, as perfectly tuned as when he’d driven it last. This, then, was where he would let reality take hold: here, in this car, on this road, in this world he knew to be real.
Something in the harshness of the land, the strength of the rock, the preternatural silence of day, suggested a deeper, older, stronger reality than any they might alter or create. For the first time in two years, he let himself feel that there might be, outside himself, a place as secure and inviolate as that within.
The sun rose, a bloody disc behind the enshrouding fog, evaporating the dampness from his clothes, and the sleepy mutterings of birds, the bawings of sheep, the vague lowing of cattle woke to a clear, bright day.
He reached into a pocket and closed his fingers on a cigar, bringing it to his lips. He changed hands on the wheel, slid a hand into the other pocket and found the lighter.
The tart smoke filled his mouth. He let it out, changed hands again, propped his arm on the door, and relaxed.
There was much to decide, and his mind felt eager for it, ready and straining as if released from some ponderous weight. The question of reality (for all his determination) still plagued him, though he could no longer consider the green farmlands passing by a dream. The day (slender trees, blue sky, wind, car beneath him, the smooth grey surface of the paving) was too vivid, too real, too complete for illusion.
He rejected the possibility (not allowing himself to know that in illusion he might necessarily do the same).
He must, in any case, assume he saw a pattern behind their pattern, saw somewhere close to the truth. He had only one question: Where in reality would he find an answer to explain their madness? That he could predict them seemed a small enough victory if he could not understand them. He must see not only their design, but its source; otherwise he could at best counter them, never win.
He was, of course, even without that knowledge, still at an advantage. They could not control everything, he had to believe that. The reality of wind and storm, these (surely) could not be faked. They must count, ultimately, on his own self-betrayal: that he would become inundated by trivia and collapse from exhaustion.
Certain things were obvious. (A post stood at the corner of the road. Its faded iron sign read: SHREWSBURY, 38. He turned right with it and came down a levelling of the mountain into a valley.) The girl: she was fake, this much was easy to see. His escape was part of their plan. Only this present freedom was not faked: this was the real world, they could not be in control of it. He was free at last, and he must not miss his chance.
It was not so important that he remain free as that he reassure himself of the things freedom held. He must put his finger on the pulse of reality once and for all, that they might never shake him again.
He would have to see Janet, of course. She, at least, was the one thing on which he could depend. She and his mind. With so few weapons he would conquer.
He took a final puff of the cigar and flung it into the wind. The road dipped and the speed of the descent rushed through him, wind blowing back against his face, cooling the perspiration from his brow.
The miles swept by as the road rose and fell, curving past thatched-roofed houses, tall hedges and rocky fields, running south and east towards London.
He kept his foot on the accelerator until the last possible moment, then, just as he nosed down the ramp into the garage, he pressed in on the clutch, pulled back on the gear shift and then pressed forward: down-shifting. The engine roared sending high, whining echoes along the grey concrete walls and into the dimness below. Then the car levelled and he reduced speed, emerging on a vast level lot that shone harshly beneath a few fluorescent lights.
There were other cars around him, parked in neat, civil service rows, and he rolled forward, towards a gate. The gate guarded a steel-link cage. Before it, just to the side, and level with his right arm (as he pressed the clutch, the brake, and shifted into neutral, coming to a stop), was an orange box with a slot in front.
He took a hand from the wheel, bent towards the glove compartment and thumbed the latch. The card was there: on a pile of maps, exactly as he’d left it.
He picked up the card, leaned to the right and inserted it in the slot. As it went in, the interior lit and the box began to hum. When the card was fully inside it pressed back against his fingers and the light went out. The box clicked once and the gate began to rise.
He put the card back in the glove compartment, shut the panel, and settled back, shifting into first. The wheels bumped on to a steel platform caged on two sides with steel links: the front and rea
r were open. When he was just inside the gate dropped back, and as he braked to a stop, the lift rattled and sank with a hiss of compressed air.
He felt a tense anticipation of the coming meeting and sensed that one more erosion in him. He was being immersed in an illusion so great it seemed to be reality itself. That was the core of their game: to create the illusion of illusion where only reality existed, and the illusion of reality where only illusion existed. For on the day he should readily fail to distinguish the two, their game would be won.
(An empty lot opened at his feet, rose, passed.)
He could not believe they had not seen that flaw: he had only to wait. So complex an illusion could not be maintained without error. And the moment they slipped he would know where reality lay. Proof lay on every hand (like substance within illusion) as solid and real as the chimes of Big Ben.
It was as if, in their determination to undo him, they sought not to ensnare him, but to subvert him. How else was he to explain it? Surely they saw the truth as easily as he.
(Another level, its Euclidean geometry vacant and empty, gaped, and closed.)
If they knew him, why did they labour so long against him when he gave them not even the satisfaction of his anger? Why was he thought a fit subject for their purpose? Unless it was in his very intractability that their desires lay: an awful perversion of reality in which their actions had no motives, their madness no object—destruction without reason.
He was finally (in the concrete reality of the lift, sinking below level after level of empty, shadowy lot) convinced he would defeat them.
The platform moved past the interface between floors and he saw the flat, stained surface of the bottom lot.
The lift came even with the floor and stopped. Compressed air sighed, became silent. The metal gate lifted.
Something seemed to tug at the muscles of his neck. He turned his head: there was a camera mounted in the rear corner of the cage.
He looked down at the dash, shifted into first, pressed in on the accelerator and shot down the aisle towards a set of double doors in the far wall. He braked and swung left, switching off the engine.
He dropped the keys into his pocket, swung open the door, put a foot to the floor and stepped out. He strode directly to the metal doors, twisted his wrists out, seized the two handles, flung them wide behind him as he went forward into the room.
There was a square desk set in the middle of the floor: an intercom on its surface. A thin clerk with dark hair and dark eyes sat behind the table. There were four doors in the wall behind him.
The young man looked up. His chapped lips parted:
‘Zed M Seventy-three!’ he said in astonishment.
‘I wish to see the Colonel.’
‘Yes, Zed M Seventy-three. Right away.’
The young man pressed a button and spoke: ‘Zed Em Seventy-three to see you, sir.’
The reply was low, tinny and indistinguishable.
‘Go right in, sir. It’s through—’
‘I know the way.’ He walked around the desk to the left hand door. It slid aside as he approached. He went down a panelled corridor and turned right. A plaque on the door read PRIVATE. He rapped perfunctorily and let himself in.
The Colonel (for just a moment he had a sensation of utter wrongness) stood at the other end of the room adjusting the curtains on a night-time view of Piccadilly Circus and the jungle at its feet. The Colonel turned (and the feeling vanished beneath his need to know: how much truth was to be found here?), bushy hair and cotton-fluff eyebrows luminous in the shadow. His skin was smooth tan, liver-spotted, his eyes old and tired.
‘Zed Em Seventy-three.’ Eloquent brown eyes looked out from beneath tangled brows. ‘I am pleased to see you.’
The old man limped up to him and stopped, gaze searching and intent. Then he sighed and turned his head, staring out at the metropolis below, ‘Zed Em Seventy-three,’ he said wearily, ‘you are suspicious. That place’—the words were bitter—‘has had its effect, even upon you.’
He followed the Colonel’s gaze through the window to the smoky lights of the cars and the harsh neon of the marquees. And, with a numb start, like the beginning of fear, he remembered where he was, how far below ground. (The illusion had been so real he had not stopped to question, had had only that moment’s unease for warning.)
The old man’s head jerked around. He smiled. ‘How do you like my toy?’ He was proud. ‘Never could abide these underground rooms. You remember? I asked to be moved upstairs from the beginning. But Housing refused, said they were hard put enough for space even with all these new excavations. So I demanded this.’ His hand indicated the false window and he grinned. ‘A television screen connected with a camera on the roof. It makes me feel less cooped up.’
Images (had they seemed like buildings, cars, streets only the instant before?) moved across the pane/screen: flickers of light, suggestions of motion, darkness in irregular patterns. He seemed to be looking down the very centre of the maze to a place where, like an unanswered question, only blankness lay. Was this credible, or was it not? He could not escape the knowledge that, before the Village, he would not have paused to wonder.
‘Interesting,’ he said.
The Colonel’s eyes grew thoughtful, sad. ‘You’ve not come back as you went, that much is certain.’ He shook his head and made his way to the opposite side of his desk. He drew out a high backed leather chair and sank down. ‘Take a seat, Zed Em Seventy-three.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ He brought a plastic stool up to the desk.
The Colonel continued: ‘They’ve changed you. You’re tense and run down. You’re no longer a healthy, thinking animal. You’re apprehensive, nervous, suspicious.’ The old man’s eyes sought his and locked. ‘Do you think you’re up to killing?’
The question was like a knife-blade of reality, cutting at once—as if (and perhaps it was) deliberately planned—to the heart of his uncertainty: Would the murders be real or not?
‘I think I am ready to do the job.’ He was ultimately brought to so fine an equivocation as this.
‘I’m glad to know that,’ the Colonel said.
‘I’ have some questions,’ he said carefully. This was where he stepped fully into the unknown.
‘I thought you might,’ the Colonel answered.
‘You sent for me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, it is a British installation?’
‘The Village? Yes, it’s ours, right enough.’
‘And I was taken there because I refused to give the reason for my resignation?’
The Colonel nodded, sighed. ‘Yes. You were so adamant that Sir Charles became suspicious.’ The name sent a jolt down his spine, and the old man looked at him pityingly. ‘Yes, Zed Em Seventy-three, your fiancée’s father. He reasoned that if you were to defect, no matter what motive you might have, your veracity would prevent you from lying and that you’d refuse to answer altogether.’
‘Perceptive of him.’
‘Your loyalty was, after all, Sir Charles’s responsibility.’
‘And’—this seemed the worst treason of all—‘Taggert went along with it?’
The Colonel’s eyes were bitter, frustrated. ‘He hardly had a choice.’
(That was true enough. It had been, after all, one of the reasons for his resignation.)
‘You cannot imagine,’ the Colonel said, and he felt a mortal dread, knowing what came next, ‘how much easier it would be for all of us if you would just’—the old man’s voice hardened—‘explain your…retirement.’
‘I think that best kept to myself,’ he said, and felt restless at the limitation.
‘I understand. This is no more than I expected. You see why I want the place destroyed.’
‘Then,’ he said abruptly, ‘let’s get on with it. Who are the men I’m to kill?’
He pulled in before the familiar red brick of his mews, shut off the engine, dropped the keys in his pocket, got out and went along the walk
to the door.
(He tilted his head, staring through a chink between curtain and frame in the tall bay window: his front room was lit.)
The door closed and he went towards his apartment, body held tight in the expectancy of some further illusion.
The door swung open before him.
Beyond it the short, obsequious body of his butler stood framed in the light. The severe black of his suit curved round him like the carapace of a giant and sinister beetle. His face was swart, solemn, angelic (or stupid). There was something Montenegrin in the man’s tiny smooth features, dark skin and bland expression.
He stalked into the room, wheeled (a warm 18th century landscape to his left, above the fireplace), staring down at the dwarf and frowning.
The little man stared back impassively, face a round rubbery mask, eyes flat and a little stupid.
‘A Pernod, Sancho,’ he ordered. He had, after all, a great deal to do. Tiredness was a hard ache between his shoulders.
The dwarf bowed, closed the door, and went past the bay window to the kitchen.
He let his hands fall and turned about, going over to the shelving.
The pale grey screen on the television was unlit, dustless, the blue wood shelves enclosing it dustless. He grasped the edges of the screen and pulled out: the front section of the chassis rolled towards him, swung to the side, revealed a wall safe in the back of the cabinet.
He knelt, reached in and twisted the dial to O, turning it slightly to both sides, clearing it. Then he rotated the dial right to 21, left to 33, and then back to 12. The tumblers clicked. He let go and seized the handle, pulled down, then back.
The door came open. There were three stacks of twenty pound notes (four hundred pounds each) on the top shelf. A wide, flat box took up the bottom. He took a stack of notes and placed it in his inside coat pocket. Then he closed the door, raised the handle and spun the dial, locking it.
The dwarf was behind him, Pernod on a silver tray. He took it and sipped. It was almost disgustingly sweet: but the aftertaste—He shuddered.